Cheapo AC Delco Starter Rebuild

[LT1 Burb]

I needed a new starter for my 65 resto project and wanted to keep date coded AC Delco starter I had. Well as luck would have it I had a Cardone starter laying around so decided to see if I could steal some parts out of it. As you can see the brushes on the AC Delco were shot. I had to remove and swap the armatures as the Cardone rotor was slightly bigger in Diameter, bead blasted and painted the case , Delco stamping shows up nicely. Bead blasted the nose and cleaned it out and installed the rotor with the brushes out of the Cardone starter.

[LT1 Burb]

Bead blasted the irons and reinstalled them and finished painting the front cover. Will post a pic of a cheap easy rebuild that saved me at least 150.00 and the headache of finding a matching starter.

[aerotruk63]

When you stop and just think of it! All the parts are there, no one see's the gut's of it and there's no date stamp on them.

[luvbowties]

Originally Posted by LT1 Burb

I needed a new starter for my 65 resto project and wanted to keep date coded AC Delco starter I had. Well as luck would have it I had a Cardone starter laying around so decided to see if I could steal some parts out of it. As you can see the brushes on the AC Delco were shot. I had to remove and swap the armatures as the Cardone rotor was slightly bigger in Diameter, bead blasted and painted the case , Delco stamping shows up nicely. Bead blasted the nose and cleaned it out and installed the rotor with the brushes out of the Cardone starter.

Were the armatures, themselves, the same in diameter(I understand the CD-rotor was bigger.)? And which one did you use? Which coils, original or Cardone did you use? Which irons(I'm assuming that's what I call 'coil-cores'.)did you use? And which case/housing did you end up with?

The pics may offer a distorted relative size, but was one set of coils thicker? Which set? (And it seems like a thicker set would use thicker irons and a smaller armature?) Was 1 set of the irons actually thicker? Which set?

Lastly, how strong did the starter seem to be? Man! So many variables, yet workable combinations.
Thanks for the write-up and all the info.
Sam

[LT1 Burb]

Sorry, if I could figure out how to sort each picture and give a more detailed description I would. I tried 5 different ways and gave up. I used the Cardone armature and irons as they are a matched set, I did this because the rotor out of my AC Delco starter was nasty and decided not to use it. The 2 cases were identical in diameter so all the parts interchanged so really you could use either combination. If my rotor was in decent shape I would have just used the Brushes out of the Cardone unit. I ended up with the AC Delco externals and complete Cardone internals, and I am going to use the Delco coil as it is much bigger than the repop one.