One of the most frustrating things that can happen to you as a golf cart mechanic is meeting up with a problem that “comes and goes” whenever it wants to. Argh! The only blessing that I can boast of receiving from dealing with the “I’ll act up when I get good and ready kind of cart” chapter of my golf cart repair career, is that it taught me the value of wrench throwing. Wrench throwing is kind of a lost art. With handheld readers taking over and doing all of the work for you, the level of frustration that we used to be able to experience when working on these beasts just isn’t the same. I miss having a wrench slip off of a nut and letting me bang my knuckles real hard on the valve train (or whatever). There is nothing quite like the sound of a 9/16 inch (or even larger) wrench hitting the pavement from a good solid toss. It just has a soothing “ring” to it that I can’t fully describe. You can throw smaller ones, but they just don’t offer as much satisfaction. I wouldn’t waste my time throwing anything smaller than 1/2 inch. My wife learned quickly to take cover amidst my fits of rage.
Anyway, back to the intermittent cart thing. All I can do, is to relay to you a thing or two that I have learned about the process, but the first and foremost thing that I can emphasize is the importance of how you react when it DOES act up. Let’s take a classic example of a situation that I have seen many times and go from there. As a matter of fact, this exact scenario just played out this morning on MY old Hyundai golf cart. Sure enough, there I was just cruising along and BAP. Just like someone had turned the key off.
So let’s say you are driving along in your 1998 Club Car and it just coasts to a halt. Of course, your first reaction is going to be to let up on the throttle and then step on it again to see if it takes off again. That’s certainly what I did. Let’s say it doesn’t, like mine didn’t. This is perhaps the most important moment in the process. It is beyond the scope of this post to try to go into the whole trouble shooting process, but we will discuss where to start. There have been many books written about trouble shooting electric golf carts, and of course, I still recommend the one that I wrote entitled “Electric Golf Cart Repair 101 (and a half). I had it available, chapter by chapter, on this web site for quite a while, but I recently published it as an ebook, and it is available from Amazon. Just follow the following link: Ebook.
At this point, our first priority is to NOT to disturb anything until we have a chance to think it through and at least pin things down a little. So many times, the first thing the aggravated driver does is to lift the seat and start moving things around: wiggling wires around, etc. The problem is that while doing that, the accelerator is not being depressed (or at least it better not be) so even if a loose connection is at fault, you will never know if you’ve fixed the problem or not. You might put the seat back down and the cart moves, but what was the problem? You’ve moved so many things around that you probably have no idea what really made the cart start working again. Perhaps nothing you did had anything to do with the problem at all (that’s why the problem will probably come back). It might have just needed to sit for a while to correct itself, or even just moving the seat might have moved something else (like a bad connection) that affected the outcome.
I think that listening to the Main Contactor is where you should begin. We know that it is a solenoid and should make some noise when it is energized. So, start there. Gently depress the accelerator and listen to see if it energizes (without disturbing anything else). It should take three things happening to get it to energize (go “clunk”): the Key Switch should have to be turned on, the Forward/Reverse microswitch should have to be activated (by the F/R switch being in the Forward position), and the Accelerator microswitch should have to be activated. So, if all of these things are in order, and the Main Contactor DOES or DOESN’T energize, we have an important piece of information in our hands. We can start with a meter at the Main Contactor and quickly find out which direction to work toward. If the solenoid doesn’t go “clunk”, either it is bad, or the logic switches responsible for energizing it (those mentioned earlier) aren’t happy. If it does go “clunk” and the cart still doesn’t go, then that is a different story. The solenoid could still be bad (they can go bad in such a fashion as to still go “clunk” but not actually make contact inside). But if that isn’t it, the problem would more likely be on the “high energy” side (like the motor speed controller, wiring to the batteries and motor, Forward/Reverse switch (not microswitch) or the motor itself. But at least by listening to the solenoid, you’ve got some place to start. On my Hyundai, the solenoid didn’t go “clunk”. When I put a meter on the post of the solenoid that had to be energized (the + on the coil side), I found that as I depressed the accelerator, sure enough the needed voltage WAS there, but yet no “clunk”. It was, indeed, a bad solenoid. The lack of “clunk” lead me right to the problem. It’s not always that easy, especially if the problem is highly “come and go-ish”, but at least it is a starting point.
Remembering back over the whole time that I was a golf cart mechanic, I can’t count the times that someone brought me a cart with an intermittent issue and give me a list of all the things they had already replaced. Because they never listened to the solenoid, and then headed at least in the right direction, they never figured out what was actually happening, they were just throwing parts at it.
Listening to that solenoid should be the first step! Throwing a few wrenches might help too!
Ron Staley has published the following books, and you can get more information about them by just clicking on each title below:
Electric Golf Cart Repair 101 (and a half)
Techniques, Tips, Tools and Tales
Gas Golf Cart Repair 101 (and a half)
Techniques, Tips, Tools and Tales
4-Stroke Golf Cart Engines Explored
What Makes Them Tick
By an old Slot Machine Mechanic