Thread: Ease of removing & fitting 300 TDI starter motor

Hello All,

The Discovery is the only one I have driven, so my experience is very specific only to one vehicle - so bear with me, please. When I first tried to start the car by turning the key ignition it did not result in the starter motor starting. After some trial and error of flicking different switches and pressing buttons I found a big rubber bulb-shaped button located on the dash to the left of the steering wheel. When I pressed the button the starter motor worked and started the engine. Is this press button start button a standard feature like the Series 1 had? Or did the previous owner have issues with the starter motor circuit and rigged something up by installing the starter button on the dash?

I will take a photograph of the starter button tomorrow after the sun comes up.

Kind regards
Lionel

Check ur cables too. ie. both pos and neg for connection issues, or degraded lines(dreaded copper green).

Could just be a bad earth at the block or something.

Starter is on the exhaust side, IIRC the exhaust makes it a tad tight in there to swing some tool types, but I don't recall that it's not a hard job to do.

I didn't actually end up removing mine, just got under there to start replacement, and found my earth cable a wee bit loose .. doh!

6 years later, I still have the starter I bought for it ... and only reason starter hasn't failed, is because I held onto the new starter for so long

And no bulb like starter button.
I'd say ignition switch has retired from it's electrical duties and previous owner went with the cheaper option of a start button instead of a new ign switch.

Another thing I thought of after my first reply ... do you wait for the preheat/glowplug light to go out before starting?
Tdi has a timed glow plug system. I think about 10sec or so(maybe more) ... but mine has always needed the glow plugs to do their work before firing up quickly.

So, if I immediately start, battery sounds sluggish, and tdi needs more cranking time to fire up.
If I use IGN on - wait 10sec - then hit starter, cranking is much faster and fire up is less than a second.

I'm thinking that she don't enjoy having both the starter AND glow plugs consuming all those amps at the same time.