On Diesel vans I've seen a couple of cases where the starter bushings
(either front or rear on the starter motor) have been so brittle so one
could imagine that they would easily disintegrate. I'm thinkiing that towards
the end of their life the bushings heat up and become brittle.

Not sure if this is a likely explanation for a gas engine, where the
load on the starter is less than 1/2 of a Diesel.

Martin

Brian Jarvinen <brianvwagain@YAHOO.COM> wrote: Well it has been another long couple weeks sorting out
electrical
gremlins. [I'll have another post shortly about
alternator fun.]

I am in the process of replacing a starter and
naturally this requires
changing the starter bushing. (Thank you VANAGON
archives!)
Per the many posts over the years I went to do it with
a 12mm tap
(some posts mentioned a 7/16 tap but I figured the
metric would
be more accurate) but ran into a surprise in the
process. A bit of
background - 84 Westy, stock 1.9L, manual trans; after
removing
the starter (but without taking off the axle, I really
don't wanna do
that if I don't have to), by finger-tip feel alone it
felt like
perhaps the bushing was already splitting in two as I
could feel
a pronounced gap in part of it's circumference. I
hoped I could
exploit that with a pair of needle nose pliers perhaps
but of course
the bushing is in there far tighter than that. So I
turn the tap in
and it gets a nice bite going and is moving down in
there until
resistance ends. Per what I have read I kept turning
several more
turns assuming the bushing was in the process of being
backed
out up the tap. And of course most of this is done on
feel
without being able to see much, especially with the
axle
still attached. So after what seemed like enough
additional turns
to get the bushing moving out I figured by now I could
pull it the
rest of the way, so I pull the tap out.

And there was no bushing! There was plenty of metal
debris all
over the tap, but I didn't hear any metal sounds of
the rest of it
falling anywhere. So my question is: Where did it go?

Could it have been so thin that the tap extraction
process made
it disintegrate?

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