Yesterday my '86 Dodge Caravan blew out a rear brake line while I was in Vancouver on my way to visit a friend from work who was in a care facility awaiting surgery for broken bones from falling off a ladder while installing an interactive LCD projector in our middle school library. TMI?

I arranged a tow back to my house in Woodland and after many texts, emails, and phone calls I got someone to volunteer to drive to my house in Woodland to pick up my '85 E150 and bring it to me.

Background: I'm disabled and use a powerchair for mobility, no one I know personally has a wheelchair accessible van though we have one at work and there's a guy next to our middle school who owns one, but I don't know him personally.

At any rate after my Caravan was towed off my Ford showed up. I had the driver turn off the engine so I could run the barn doors and the Ricon lift. The van locks out the door and lift if the engine is running as a safety feature, something my other accessible vans didn't do.

I got in the van, transferred to the driver's seat, turned the key, and the starter cranked very very slowly as if the battery were dead, but the van started on the first try. I killed the engine and tried again with the same results. I figured dirty battery terminals and when I got home some three and a half hours after the Caravan's brakes failed I emailed my father in law and offered to take him to lunch today in exchange for checking and cleaning my battery terminals.

Today my father in law showed up, hopped in the van, turned the key and the starter turned over just fine.

We checked the battery terminals and though they weren't what I could call spotless the looked really good. We cleaned the terminals anyway, and like before the starter worked fine and the van started right up.

Both days it was in the low 40s outside, today it was raining but yesterday it was cloudy and dry. The person who picked my van up at home hadn't mentioned an issue with the starter.

I'm assuming this problem didn't just "Go away" Any ideas? Dying starter? Dying solenoid? The battery cables looked pretty good. The lift draws a fair bit of current when raising under the load of me and my powerchair and it worked just fine.

I'm so glad I bought the Ford last September. I don't know how I would have gotten home otherwise, the Dodge didn't even have the common sense to blow out the brake line on a bus route, thankfully it did have the common sense to blow out the brake line in a driveway., and not while getting off the freeway or stopping at a traffic light.

 

Having recently removed a Braun lift along with nearly every bit of its originally installed wiring and components I'm wondering if there's a circuit breaker under the hood near the battery that feeds the lift? I wouldn't say the connections and heaving wiring were poor quality but I've seen better terminated connections before.

Not sure if an issue with the lift's wiring could or did interfere with your starter but since both are tied to the chassis battery I'd look there for an possible problems.

 

There's circuit breaker for the doors and lift. It's a black box with very large gauge cables and a rotating circuit breaker. Wiring looks good, it's got one lead going to the input to the starter solenoid (From what I can see from my wheelchair).

The battery wires look okay, and the cables on the starter solenoid look okay. I gave the wires a tug just to be sure nothing was just holding on my a thread. My '75 Ford E150 had a power wire fall off the starter solenoid and short out burning up a lot of wire under the hood, it also looked good but the wire connector had rotted through. The van was less than six years old when that happened.

I haven't had the need to drive since Saturday but I'll keep an eye on it.

 

Though the battery terminals and posts looked okay removing the cables and cleaning the terminals seems to have solved my dragging starter issue.

I used my van four times today, each time the van sat long enough for the engine to cool off and need to be warmed up again. The starter worked great all four times.

But with the powered doors and Recon lift having to be used twice before each start I should buy a larger battery.

 

You could also have a competent trusted shop do a starter amp draw on your existing battery----with the newly cleaned connections that would give a good indication what condition its in presently. Do the same with the existing battery and charging system in general---get an idea if your alternator is producing the right amount of power to recharge the battery.

If you happen to go to a larger capacity battery knowing the general condition of your electrical system would maybe let you avoid any possible failures waiting to strand you at the wrong time.