so, the foot pedal part of my starter died, and i wanted to replace that with a modern starter solenoid to compliment the 12v system swap i have previously done. it turns out that there really is no bolt on way to do this.
3 days of searching produced a lot of information about swapping over to old 12v systems, but nothing about what i had my heart set on doing, so i made my own frankenstarter.
so...if you happen to have a spare starter lying around that you dont mind risking the very soul of, then you might find the tutorial i wrote about my adventures interesting.
the link is here:
http://49chev6400.webs.com/apps/blog/depending on when you read this,you may need to scroll down a while to get to it, as my blog doesnt really allow me separate my entries.
for a preview, this is the text i wrote:
this is my first frankenstein tutorial for my truck.......sometimes, you simply cant have your cake and eat it too unless youre willing to get a little creative about how you get to eat your cake. So, I REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted to use a modern starter solenoid, but could find no way to do so without replacing my flywheel, and tons of other odd work. Way too complex for such a simple task, as far as i am concerned. so...time to get creative......
this is the finished product. my frankenstarter.
in order to get here, i tried to do things more simply, but it simply would not work. so.......the logical steps, if i were to repeat this surgery would go like this:
make sure the starter works in the first place. i didnt know if it was the foot pedal, or the motor that went bad, so i tested. i dont have a fancy shop just yet, so i had to do this by hand. i was prepared in case this starter motor had some monster torque when the juice was applied. mine luckily does not, yours might, so take precautions when testing if youre not going to do it in a " proper " manner.
so, i took the foot pedal part off, and zapped the little copper nub that sits on top of the starter motor, and she came to life. a little note to make here, is that the gear wont quite engage properly when the electricity is applied directly to the nub. it turns out that the foot pedal is needed to actually push the gear forward when starting.
next step is securing my new bits to this tiny little nub. its too tiny to be useful unto itself, so here is where i first got creative. i dont have any pics of this exact step, but its simple enough. i used a 3/8 drill bit, and made about a 1/4 inch deep hole in the nub.
next, i took apart a small hose clamp, and made my new starter wire:
so, i put them together in the order shown above, so that the hose clamp will also clamp in the new wire most securely.
then i put the hose clamp on the nub as best as i could, but since it is such a tiny little nub, it would not hold well unto itself. much care had to be used for the next step:
i filled in the hose clamp with solder used for copper piping in plumbing. i filled in the hole i drilled, and i kept adding solder until the hose clamp had been filled in all the way.
one point of note to be made here: i have no clue how the nub attaches to the rest of the motor, so i used low heat to make sure i didnt desolder anything inside, just in case.
another note, i did end up slightly dislodging the nub from being quite as secure as it once had been.....part of my experimentation that went wrong. when this happenned, the starter would not work. i turned the nub back to its original heading, and it worked again. so, now i have to make sure the nub is aligned in its original orientation, or it wont work. so, when i was done with everything, i used my trusty zip ties to hold the lead wire in place to help maintain orientation, as shown in the first picture, which is the finshed product.
any tie up questions? email me:
[email protected]the blog contatins explanatory pics
also, i cant say that i recommend this procedure to anyone just yet, as it has no real world use yet, but ill tell you in 6 months if this turns out to be safe to utilize or not.
