bigchief

I've gone through probably 3 or 4 starters in this car since I bought it in 03' and put edelbrock shorty headers on it. any suggestions on a heat shield? my Y-Pipe sits right above the starter solenoid.

I'm thinking of going with the Summit brand mini-starter with hopes of having more room to build a heat shield around it.

Thanks

paulo57509

Mr. Gasket, Moroso and other aftermarket companies make heat shields that bolt onto the OEM starter.

no new tires

Jegs mini starters are cheap junk and will leave you stranded for hours. You have been warned...

-get a power master, their smaller, lighter and less expensive

bigchief

I bought a power master, but it had 10 teeth on it and my original had 9. I ended up just buying another original with worked fine. I wrapped the exhaust with some heat shield since there was little to no room to put anything around the starter itself.

One question about grounding. If the surface between the starter and the block is rusty, will that create grounding issues with the starter and the accessories in the car??? I never realized before that there is no return line that runs to the starter, so it must use the ground from the screws?

paulo57509

Probably not a problem. However, you should remove what corrosion that's there before bolting on the starter.

Damon

Mini starter. They work so well you wonder why you were even thinking about installing a heat shield on a full sized one (which is only of marginal effectiveness anyway).

Gear reduction mini starters are about the best thing invented since sliced bread. They draw a LOT less amps, they are an inch further away from the exhaust (and inch is a lot) and they just don't heat-soak as bad as a full-sized starter.

You can buy a cheapie on eBay for about $65 and it'll probably work fine. Or you can spend more on a Powermaster and it'll work really fine. I bought one from the mothership- GMPP- and it's worked flawlessly for 12 years.

Where they do NOT work well:

1. Engines with a lot of compression/base timing that like to "kick back" against the starter. You'll strip the planetary gears out of the gear reduction unit eventually. There are no gears to strip out of a full sized GM starter, BTW.

2. Engines that crank half of forever before they start. If this is you, don't get a mini starter. They were designed for engines that fire up quickly (EFI engines). They will overheat and damage themselves much faster than a full sized starter if you need to grind away on them for extended periods of time.

bigchief

well, I've used a powermaster in the past and I overheated that too. I went back to the original after that, and that was maybe 4 years ago (only a few thousand miles).

Anyway, I'm returning the powermaster mini to summit since it just wouldn't work when I tried it. installed it with no shims, 2 shims, 4 shims.... it would never turn the flexplate. It just kept getting stuck. maybe I was doing something wrong, but after a while I ran to the store and picked up another OEM.

once I realized it had a different amount of teeth compared to the original (10 vs 9) I decided to install the original back in.

Damon

Which one did you use? Wondering if you just got the wrong one for the application.

bigchief

PWM-9100

https://www.summitracing.com/parts/pwm-9100

I just got reimbursed by summit. haven't had any issues with the OEM since I installed it a few weeks ago. I might have to do a better job on the heat shield though.