01 Monte Carlo with mystery problem
 

Oh man, so my car has been cranking slowly over the last few days, maybe almost a week. I figure the battery is a little over 4 years old so I got a new one and put it in. I made sure I brushed the battery contacts off when I did this as well.

The day I changed it the car sounded fine, but the next day I headed to work in the morning and it was cranking really slowly again. I don't even know how it turned over when I left for home later on, but once the engine started everything else seemed fine.

So I took it up to my buddy's shop to let him look at it and they called me back later and says, "Battery is good, alternator is good, no visible electrical issue drawing power... and basically we can only guess what is wrong."

Which basically means they could try a few things to fix it from there but I'm going to have to pay for it and they don't want me to get pissed when whatever they do fails to fix it. They referred me over to another shop that is more equipped for the trouble, as this place is mainly a muffler shop.

I've done some internet searches, asked around, I can't get a hint on what the problem is here. Some places are saying it could be the timing belt, but I don't want to try and tackle that kind of job without being relatively sure that's the problem.

i would check the starter it may be going out i know that when the windings burn out they put too much resistance on the starter motor check the resistance in the starter solinoid and the motor itself

A starter does that when it goes ****ty? I will give that a shot, thanks bud.

another thing that you can check is see if it is getting the correct voltage into the starter your wire from your battery to the starter could be bad your battery could be good but your wire may be corroded check for breaks in the insulation all the way down corosion could be creating too much resistance and you might get too much voltage drop from the wire to the starter

i would check to make sure that the starter connections are good, not that i've seen many starter wires go bad on w-bodies or starters for that matter. make sure that the battery hold down is tight and the battery cannot move around at all. if a battery is loose it will not charge well while driving, vibrations drain them also. also make sure that the engine ground is good as well as the chassis ground to the battery.

other possibilities include bad brand new battery, alternator overcharging (this will actually boil the electrolyte out of the battery), an intermittant alternator problem.

Thanks for all the replies.

Due to time constraints and me needing this thing fixed ASAP I've turned it over to a starter and alternator specialist shop. I will report back whatever they tell me.

Well it turned out to be the starter, as the guys at the other place suspected but were not sure about. I got hit for about $175 to put one on.

Although this was something that I probably could have taken care of myself in more ideal conditions and could have shelled out less money on, I was happy that it wasn't something worse. Thank you all for your help.

Thanks for giving us an update on what the issue was.