Dude if after all this and it’s only the battery, I’m going to pay you a visit 
you’re welcome to come on down!!! hell man, idk what it is or could be… but i do know Mr. Murphy is around all the time, and he’s constantly interjecting himself in all this all the time.
I got all cocky after watching a few rewiring’s and decided to get rid of my project cycles harness and build my own…4 years later I’m still so close…
electrical is always crazy, it’s like you think the problem is here in the fuseblock ,but really its on the other side of the car and it’s got something to do with the seat belt.
Got it
Check for power at the solenoid terminal of the starter when key is being cranked.
This will be the smaller of the 2 wires on the starter. The large one will have battery voltage all the time. The small one should have battery voltage when the key is in start mode.
yeah thats y worry.. but you’re darn right about that aseat belt lol..
definately going to do just that.
i put the new battery in yesterday afternoon. we didnt trouble shoot anything else other than putting the battery in the car and trying to crank it. as you guessed.. it did NOT start. did the ssame thing agian. Dead stick. no noise, no nothing. depressing. SO… what we did do yesterday besides the battery was we took the two spare doors i had bought from facebook marketplace, and removed the power window regulators, and motors, as well as the power door lock mechanisms for both doors, and both power mirriors. then we tested every single one with power, and found that we have working door lock actuators, working power mirrors, and both motors on the window regulators need replaced. so im gonna do the new motors before i put the regulators in the car obviously cause its much easier to swap them while its out of the doors. (all this was important because ive been adding these power accesories to my car. it will make it easier for me since i cant lean across the seat anymore due to health reasons.
getting back to starting issue. next time i go, we are going to first bypass the clutch switch i think. if that does not fix it we are also going to check the voltage at the starter. if that doesnt fix it we’re gonna also take apart the steering column again down to the ignition cylinder to double check themechanism that the ignition engages to make sure that it is in the correct teeth to push the rod down far enough to actually move the mechanism in the plastic ignition switch itself. i can also adjust the position of it by loosing the screws slightly and moving it up or down on the steering column about a quarter or half inch at most. so those are some more options to double check if necessary.
you know i have said in the past i don’t think its the starter, as it makes ZERO noise, no bendex noise at all, and gave no typical signs of failure, and that it is also a mini-starter by powermaster. well all that said and done, I’m definately gonna check the power when the key is turned just to cross our t’s and dot our i’s so to speak. I don’t want to be super stupid and rule it out just cause it “shouldn’t” have ever been a problem. better to be safe than sorry, and i appreciate you guys mentioning it enough to me to make me want to double check that as well.
for all the good of learning that i had good door lock actuators, good power mirrors now, and good regulator, im still severely bummed out about it not starting. I’ll get her ironed out eventually im sure.. thank you for all your ideas, and your continued help with this guys. its some of the only thing keeping me sane.
stay focused on one thing at a time till it can be ruled out. its easy to go side ways, and the result will be your head spinning. like others have said, see if your getting any voltage at your small key wire on the starter solenoid with the key in crank position, when your friend can help you. record reading. also have him put red meter lead on pos cable at starter while in crank position, to prove starter has 12v to use. while he’s down there, have him use a jumper wire to jump 12v from starter pos cable to key wire on solenoid—it should crank to rule out starter. if in question of main ground(s), grab your jumper cables, clamp 1 end to batt neg post, and other end to unpainted clean surface of block and try. if nothing, move clamp from block to unpainted clean surface on firewall and try. if nothing, move clamp from firewall to unpainted clean surface on frame and try. if nothing still, you just ruled out a poor main ground. stay focused on 1 thing at a time, but like others have said, you will need to know if the starter is receiving any or enough voltage to engage the solenoid. glenn
Does the dash and all the electrical light up when the key is “on” ?
When you swapped the engine did you run/attach the ground from the block to the neg battery cable?
Any pics of the engine bay?
Yes. that is what we are doing, its been a long term project just because of that. We’ve been working off a 6 page punch sheet that ive had and only working on it one day per week at most, sometimes we skip a week if we have other things come up, so yeah, its taken some time.
Your instructions regarding the starter, are exactly what we plan to do when we test out the starter side of things. hopefully we wont have to replace the starter… but at this point im not ruling anything out unless we’ve explored it to its fullness. Such as by replacing the battery already.
The motor has been in the car for years, and it drove over to my buddies house when i dropped it off. It started with being jumped off by my truck, which we’ve tried again, and it didnt do it as i mentioned earlier above. so that is why i’ve replaced the battery and that did not do anything. so now we’ll have to troubleshoot the rest. IF there is any grounds that would have been in question, it would have been in regards to the in dash wiring harness, which we replaced, Everything else but starting is working. I mean everything. lights, radio, guages, (initialize of course cant tell how well they work until it starts) so i know everything that had a ground in that harness we had already reconnected to a good ground. I really dont think it would be a ground issue at this time anyways. I do appreciate your help though regarding grounds as if i have doubts, i will do as you say regarding them.
yes the dash lights up, initialized like normal, goes dark when you turn key to run, and when release, it lights back up just like normal as it should and any other car does. just the car never even trys to start.
the motor has been in the car for at least 20+ years, so yes, the ground setup has been fine for the engine itself.
At this time i do not have any current photos of the engine bay. but if you’ve seen a carb’ed motor in a thirdgen camaro or firebird, youve basically seen them all. lol
Ok, update time.
i worked on it this past weekend with my buddy. we got a lot tested and checked, but it doesnt feel like we really got anywhere.
replaced the ignition cylinder, double checked the spring thta works with the ignition cylinder to ensure proper play. it works fine. reassembled the column, tested to see if it would start. it would not. same thing. no nothing.
so we proceeded to check / replace the clutch switch. I put in the brand new ACDelco clutch switch, and tried again. again the car did nothing. no start no nothing. like its not even getting to the starter.
so my buddy got under the car with a multimeter, and checked the two cables on it.. the thick one from the battery has +12v as it should. so we tested the little one, and when i turn the key, it gets no power at all. like its not even telling it to put power to it. so its never getting power to that starter to kick it off.
our next thought is to check the vATS relay. since i have no vats in the car anymore, the computer and the lock cylinder has no vats in it anymore, we think we should try to jump the vats relay, basically make it think it has power all the time, so that we will have power pass through there, to power the clutch switch. thus then it should pass the power through to the the starter.. or such is our thought. otherwise we’re still out of our mind and dont know what is going on.
I hate electrical gremlins. I mean you can jump a starter with straight voltage from a battery, the only thing that needs to happen is the circuit completes with the key on start and then the circuit breaks afterwards.
is it possible that it’s wired backwards to the ecu and instead of grounding the circuit it’s …doing something else? It’s possible you have a fuse or relay that’s testing good but isn’t.
Back to possible bad grounds. Vats still a possibility. I see that there is corrosion on your connectors and fasteners, I suggest a high grit sand paper and just doing some sanding anywhere there’s a connector fastener and or otherwise, double and triple check that you haven’t tried to ground to a painted surface (I HAVE done that before) and do what my uncle refers to as “the stupid check” which is just double and triple check every fastener, connector and wire and that every connector is attached to it’s proper mate just to make sure we haven’t absent mindedly done something so obvious that we didn’t notice it. Sometimes a wire will work it’s way from from a connector pin, like now I want to hop out of the sky and just look over everything on your car…it’s frustrating me lol. I guess I’d trace the small wire all the way back and check every connector in line to see if that voltage is even leaving the ignition switch or where it stops?
afternoon, did your friend apply 12 volts to small key wire at starter to prove starter will crank? next question is when you by-passed the oem, our you sending 12 volts from ign switch, to clutch switch, then starter? something you have said before was one of your clutch switch’s crumbled in your fingers and you maybe replaced ign switch more than once? reason i’am asking is if its wired from ign switch, to clutch switch, to starter—clutch switch can’t handle current draw across contacts and is getting hot as why switch could have crumbled, if was never smashed by pedal. normally the crank wire on back of ign switch will get burnt and plastic plug melt. if any of this is true, you will need to wire in a 4 pin relay, using the clutch switch to complete a ground for the relay. the relay will do all the work of carrying the load. really need to know if your friend applied 12 v to starter key wire and starter cranked. I know you where upset you spent a lot of money on a new batt, but it was proven as failed, and you have ruled that out. just don’t forget to charge it at least once a month. if you don’t think your start circuit goes through a relay, I can draw something up. glenn
solid reasoning.
yeah i didnt try to jump the solenoid at all. perhaps we should have. maybe i will next time. but we’re taking next weekend off as he has his daughters birthday party and his birthday party as well.
well the car was carbed, and then switched over to the holley EFI. so the EFI has the computer built into the holley. Nothing in the engine bay had changed. nothing at all. all the wiring / grounds/ changes were done into the main wiring harness in the dash board. so the factory ECU while still there and plugged up, is doa, basically it should control absolutely nothing, cause well theres nothing for it to do engine wise.
The reason we were thinking the Vats relay is that while before i had a vats setup still in the car, and wired, i didnt think it was doing anything at all, largely cause it had been bypassed, and there was no ECU working in the car at all to controll anything. so when we put the new engine harness in, we just removed the vats module and the wiring with it to the key cylinder. by doing all that it should have just bypassed the vats system.. however i didnt know we had a relay in line until my buddy found it on the wiring diagrams. (we’re using www.austinthirdgen.org) as they have the wiring diagrams up for free for everyone to use at their will.
From what my buddy had researched he doesnt remember a relay in the place that the relay should have been in for the vats wiring which then goes over to the clutch switch, to see if the clutch switch has any power. if it doesnt, we need to figure out why, which may be to jump the relay wiring where the vats relay used to be to get power to the clutch switch.
right, on the grounds. we are going to start double triple checking the grounds again, after i try to jump the solenoid, and after we try checking the clutch switch for power. those two are some of the biggest maybes we have to check still i think. Im especially curious on the vats relay too. I agree its smart to make sure all grounds are to solid metal and not to paint or something silly. I also agree we’ll take soem sand paper to the connections that are rusted/corroded under the car on the starter solenoid and anywhere else we see it too. I Like your uncle’s terminology. this whole thing feels like a stupid check. lol. oh well. we’ll just have to take it one step at a time slowly and see what we can figure out by process of elimination. we’ve already had a radio pin work its way out of the harness and cause intermittent issues there, so we had to go back and fix that, so im sure it could have happened elsewhere in the car too. I’d love for you pop out of the sky and overlook it. i’d even buy the beer. 
yeah tracing the wires is the last thing we want to do cause there is so many wires in the car lol.
@ghjh629 ,
no we havent tried jumping the starter solenoid yet. i beleive that the wire that we need to do it is the one pictured above with the stupid butt connector there on it so close to the end of the wire. I dont know why it was done that way and personally i think it should have been done further up the line. we may end up redoing that connection there totally with a heat shrink butt connector that is water tight. and put a new O ring connector on the end as well to make a good connection to the starter. Next time im over there working on it in 2 weeks ill definately be checking to see if jumping the wire lets the car crank or not.
Yeah the one clutch switch crumbled when we were taking it out.. so last weekend we took the one in the car out (it didnt crumble) and put in a brand new one again.. this one from AC Delco.. It felt much more stout and a bit heavier than the inexpensive one that was in the car. I say inexpensive cause rock auto sells the no name brands for like 4.00 each and the ac delco ones for like 12.00 or so…
the ignition wire that your talking about is not melted at all, and there is no burnt or plastic plug melt at all on the new wiring. the original harness we’ve also checked and it too has no melted or burnt plastic plug at the ignition to the clutch switch. So at this time there is no reason to believe that the clutch switch is getting overheated. The question about the clutch switch getting power is valid, as from what we’re seeing in the electronic wiring diagrams, the ignition wire goes to the vats relay, and then to clutch switch, and then to bulkhead, and then to starter solenoid. so we need to check the power at the clutch switch, and if nothing there, back track to the vats relay to see if it has power or if we can bypass it cause the vats is gone. which we should be able to do without issue… and then if we have power from igniton there to relay to clutch switch to bulkhead, we need then to double check the starter solenoid to see if we’re getting power there again too. by that time we should be golden, or at least know what needs to be fixed id hope. so thats the plan at this point.
friend didnt apply 12v to the starter key wire. but we will double check that next time again as stated above.
I was about the battery, but honestly it needed it either way.. so at least thats out of the problem list.
thanks for your help guys. talking it through and double checking and yoru ideas are much more helpful than you know.. it gives me piece of mind that i’ll figure it out eventually. its just frusterating as all get out. lol. you guys are such a help in keeping me off the ledge, and keep me backing away from it..
glad to help, I used to spend weekends helping my friends with cars, I miss that. It always helps to have ideas of what and how to test…but yeah like I said before electrical issues can just be zany.
yeah ive worked on cars since i turned 15, and always had a blast with friends working on them. now im so handicapped that i can only do a fraction of the things, and im a better tool b*tch than anything else. its frusterating, but my friends understand and are there to help me when i need it so im thankful for that. YOu’re so right about electrical being zany.. ive never been a fan of electrical… most ive ever done is with car stereo and installation of that.. this stuff is like mud to me. thanks again though yall are a huge help
Does the Anti-Theft circuit on the Holley impact the starting logic for the starter as well.
to my knowledge there is no anti theft on the holley sniper setup.
just the factory vats system.
Ok guys… well i have news. and well .. im over the moon. it started!!! and does so reliably now!!! It took my buddy johnny studying the wiring diagrams for a couple nights, to figure out what is what. He found that the way the system works is like this.
Key ignition to start - Power goes down to the Vats Relay. One side passthru to the Vats Processor. If the Key OHM = what is programmed into the Vats Processor, the power is then passed out of the vats processor, back into the Vats relay, which has now been grounded properly, and so then the relay sends power to the clutch safety switch. If the clutch safety switch is depressed, the switch sends power down the next wire to the bulkhead connector, which comes out into the engine bay on the firewall, and runs across the engine, and down to the starter.
SO the car had with the previous wiring harness, the VATS system bypassed. It was bypassed by taking the original key, (which has a specific ohm’ed resistor mounted in the key itself) and cutting the wire from the ignition, and soldering the two wires to either side of the key. This is how it was permanently bypassed back in the day (i.e. early 2000’s late 90s.) I’d done this around Y2K personally, and had no issues with it at all… or at least so i had thought.
For the past say 5 years, the car has had the intermittent issue with starting as i had described before. because i had the permanent fix soldered in for vats, i never once questioned it. That said, we now believe that over time (say the past 25-30 years that the resistor had been in the key) that the key had started to degrade, which would explain why the car sometimes was able to start with no issues at all, and other times it would be a dead stick entirely.
To fix the issue of not starting, and also to fix multiple other issues, such as a parasitic drain on the battery, and what not, I had elected to replace the entire dashboard/interior wiring harness. The other big goal of replacing this harness was to also include the addition of factory power windows and locks, and power mirrors. The “new” harness was sourced from Hawks Motorsports, which originally started out as Hawks Thirdgen Parts . The replacement harness was from a 90-92 Camaro Z28 5.0 l T5 5 speed car, fully loaded. It had everything we needed. When we put the harness into the car. we removed all the other extraneous things i didnt need in the car anymore cause it no longer had them. These things were the Vats processor, and multiple airbag sensors, control units, etc.
The thought about the VATS was that since it had been bypassed forever, it didnt matter if it was in there or not, as the car went carbed, and thus the vats wouldnt be able to stop the car from starting in the first place. And this apparently, was the flaw in our plans. Ya see, the VATS processor while being removed, didnt have any issue with starting. the problem was, that the vats system no longer was able to pass power through the relay to the clutch switch. So since we had removed the vats processor, we then removed the VATS Relay. The relay was useless without the processor. However, we needed to pass power from one side of the relay wiring to the other, to simulate what the vats signal processor did normally, with a good key in place. Since there was none of that, we made a jumper wire from one side that is the 12v constant, to the other wire, that was going to the clutch switch. This did the trick. Something so simple, was because we were no longer getting power to the clutch switch, which in turn passed power to the starter, and without that power, of course the car wouldnt start. By jumping the two wires where the relay had been (ignoring the other two wires where the relay had been ) this passed the power through to the clutch switch as if the VATS processor had read a good key with the proper OHM resistor, and then passed it through normally. This simple wire jump, solved the issue. The car starts now on the first shot of the key to the start position. and has done so multiple times today. so yeah, im over the moon excited.
something so simple, yet so complex. We wouldnt have been able to have figured out the path of the ignition wiring without the wiring diagrams that were free to use on Austinthirdgen.org .. that site was a life saver.
I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to all of you for your many ideas, answers, directions, and help. We were really stumped there for a long time and just couldnt figure out why. Now with it running without issue I am hoping it to be the beginning of having the car dependable to use. Thank you all again for your help, Having you guys here to assist, and bounce ideas off of, and picking your brains for knowledge made the world of difference for my sanity, and i cant thank you enough for it.