I'm fairly sure that this is a problem somewhere in the wiring to the starter. Occasionally, my truck refuses to try to start; it makes a little click coming from near the starter, but not quite the 'click' you would hear if the battery were dead.

This happened intermittantly throughout the spring, but it would usually start again after about 30 seconds without doing anything. However, it would start hard as if it was flooded or something.

More recently, you could jiggle with the wires to the starter and that seemed to help.

Yesteryday however, it was around 95 degrees here and I could not get her to start all day, even with playing with the wires. But when the sun went down, it turned over right away - but still started hard.

My obvious thought is to start replacing wires, but for some reason I have back luck with that...and why would the air temperature be a factor?

 

It could be a variety of things. You could take the battery to Interstate Batteries and have them put a load test on it; of course they'll prolly attempt to sell you a new battery along with the test. I don't think that the air temperature could have anything to do with it really...

What kind of battery do you have and how old is it?

 

maybe something to do with the AFM? i know that one of the tests has a different resistance reading for different air temperature ranges...

 

This is a somewhat common prob and replacing the starter with a quality unit seems to work. Replacing or cleaning the selonoid contacts seems to help alot also.
I have heard that this may also be a poor voltage issue due to the thin long wiring. The fix is said to be to use a Ford selonoid or equiv and by-pass the Toyota starter on-board selonoid. (allow the key to activate the ford selonoid which activates a solid 12volts thru a 4 gauge wire directly to the starter hi-amp + post)

 

Whoa.

Rather than do a bunch of crazy stuff or put anything American on my truck, I replaced the starter relay located near the battery. This appears to have worked.

 

Keep an eye on it... my vote was gonna be for starter contacts.

How old is the truck? There's nothing in your profile. (hint!)

 

Oh, yeah, forgot to mention. Its an 89 with a 22re.

Well, since I replaced the starter relay this problem has reared its ugly head one more time. The truck started, however, on the 3rd try (after I took it out of reverse, if you like coincidence mechanics).

So I'm hopeful, but concerned. Especially since it hasn't been about 90 degrees here since I "fixed" the problem. A friend suggests replacing the fusible link between the pos side on the battery and the fuse box, so that is my next step if it fails again.

 

Peel back the cover on the POS wire on the battery, see how much green crap is living in there. The click is often a sign not enough power is getting to the starter or the solenoid is going. But after you say wiggeling the wires helps, I'm back to dirty battery connections or the Pos wire is so full of green crap that the power can not flow down it, to reach the battery.

 

I fixed mine by putting some grease on the starter gear. The solinoid on these starters is what makes the contact for the motor winding. If the gear does not go out all the way then you get no power to the motor. The contact could be burned up and then you need a new starter as you can't buy just the coil.
The motor is getting flooded because when you turn the key to start the injectors give a shot. SO repeated atempts gets a bit to much gas in the cylinders so you need to crank a bit longer.

 

http://www.4crawler.com/4x4/CheapTricks/Starter.shtml

 

Why didn't you search for the starter contact replacement before giving this guy bad advice.