ooooooooooooooooooooh... THAT's why the screws were so hard to loosen!
So, yeah, I managed to get the pole shoes out after some work. At the time I just thought it was from all of the corrosion inside the starter that was causing them to stick. The reason I wanted to remove them in the first place was while the coils were intact and in good shape, the grounding wires and connectors on all of the wires (grounds and coils) needed to be re-crimped and cleaned.
Now that this is all done, have I gone too far and will never be able to get everything reassembled correctly? I don't want to oversimplify the assembly of a starter... but it seems overly simple. Hopefully I'll be able to have an extremely clean and working starter... if not, I'll have a great learning experience
