Often when I go to start my car I turn the key and the starter motor wil make a "chink" sound but then the motor just spins and doesn't turn over the engine. So it goes turn, "chink", "whrrrrrrrr". Usually after a couple times of this, it will catch the flywheel and start the car just fine. This has been going on for a month and a half with increasing frequency. This happens much more often when it is cold out, but will happen often when it isn't so cold. I was pretty sure that it was a solenoid issue and not broken teeth, but I took the starter motor off today just to make sure I wasn't grinding away at something expensive. None of the teeth were chewed up, there were the regular wear marks on the starter teeth that were there before this problem showed up.

I am still assuming this is a sticky solenoid issue but I am not sure where to go from there. I couldn't see any obvious places to lube the starter. There looked to be a couple of screws holding the solenoind on, is this something that anyone has had luck messing around with or is it simply time to buy a new starter.

Thanks for any info