mini-starter woes

[hemi68charger]

Hey gang..
Well, got the 426 Hemi going in the Daytona. She started fine initially but the started to act funny. Soon found out that the, for a lack of the appropriate term, the cone part of the starter case cracked. Then I put another new starter in and that darn one doesn't act right. Come to find out the gear teeth of the starter isn't fully seating the converter ring gear teeth. Based on the shiney part of the ring gear teeth, less than half of the surface of the teeth are meshing together. Anyone have this problem before? To get the teeth more fully engaged, do I need to find a better performance minded starter or get one that "clocks"?

The left starter is the first one in which the case broke and the right one is the one I replaced it with. It is the one where the teeth aren't fully engaging now.

[68X426]

Sorry, no answer here.  I'll be watching because my Hemi now has a starter problem that we have to diagnose.  And it sounds similar to your case.  If I learn something soon I'll post.  I'm down for a couple months after a spinal surgery, so actually it's when my friend diagnoses something we'll share.

[c00nhunterjoe]

Ive seen the starters crack like that before. And the new start issue sounds like its defective.

[68X426]

Shame that there weren't any more comments and ideas on this subject. 

So the friend got my Hemi's starter out, and the housing is "loose", hence the teeth won't engage.  It is a Powermaster (either XS or XL series). 

There are (were) two tiny screws once upon a time holding the entire housing together.  They are hidden, and the design is cheap and inferior.  He called Powermaster, and their answer, "oh yeah, those were defects, and we stopped designing them that way, now using bolts" and "ship it to us and we'll fix it".  At the price of their new ones.  No warranty. Even on a defect.

Well, no, that's not going to happen, and so I ordered a new one from DB Electric (what most everyone says is top notch).

We will modify the Powermaster as a back-up, we never liked it when it was working anyway.

hemi68charger: hope that everything turned out well for you.

[A383Wing]

I just put one in my car from a 92 Dakota, has the snout on it like the left one...works great

[mhinders]

...The left starter is the first one in which the case broke and the right one is the one I replaced it with. It is the one where the teeth aren't fully engaging now.

I broke a brand new starter just like the one you show to the left in your picture.

In my case I think the reason was that the snout wasn't perfectly centered in the auto. When tightening the starter bolts some tension was built up in the snout, and the additional force from starting the engine broke it.

I bought a new starter, very similar to the broken one, but this time I carefully checked where the snout was rubbing in the auto, and grinded off some material in that spot, to avoid tension building up when tightening the bolts.
So far the new one has performed flawlessly.