My brother’s car wouldn’t start one day, and doing some digging of his own, he found that the bare wire from the starter solenoid to the starter had corroded away and fell apart as he poked it.
I’m not sure why starters have this design, especially because it’s a power wire, not ground, so you wouldn’t want anything to touch it. I’m pretty sure this is what also happened to my dad’s Civic, though I didn’t see the wire completely fall apart like this.
In order to get the car home so I could do the work for him, my brother came up with a pretty temporary fix. I do not recommend doing this to your own car, but I was impressed by this. He used a really cheap pair of jumper cables to connect what was left of the two ends of the wire, and so was able to start it and bring it home to me. If that happens to you, either fix it where it sits or get it towed to a shop.
Happy 2016, everybody!
-Dan
Mechanical Malarkey 
I’ve had a lot of conversations about automobile electrical work. What was the size of the wires? I’ve heard for cars they tend to be huge
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I’m not sure what the wire gauge of the wire that corroded was, but it by a rough guess it could be 6 or 8 AWG. I couldn’t find a spec for that, which I’m not surprised by. The biggest wires in cars are typically the wires to the battery, alternator, and starter, because they require the largest amounts of power. Most everything else uses 16-20 AWG wires, but there are dozens of circuits, which means wiring harnesses can get to be an inch in diameter on some modern cars. I’ve heard that the wiring harness is the next heaviest part of a car after the engine and transmission.
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