[Xavier]

Guys I have done all you requested; here is what I did.

First I went down to the car and cleaned all of the grounded surfaces on the frame, engine and battery and retightened. Nothing. Then, I have a terminal strip mounted behind my dash for all of my ground wires, the terminal has an 8ga wire running to the negative side of the battery, I took another 8ga wire to from this terminal connection to the mounting bolt on the starter (at this time leaving it on the engine). Nothing. I took the starter off and played with the pinion gear, I think it is definitely mechanical toast. There is slop in it, it is very loose, and I remember originally it was very tight, very hard to pull out and even spin. Now you can feel something loose in side, so for arguments sake I think it is toasted. It does not spin, nor does the pinion come out.

I pulled out the starter and left the ground wire to my terminal strip. It engages sometimes, sometimes not, but if I put my hand out it, I belive it is really weak. I can not see it turning the engine over...it sounded bad. Clacking noise.

I am a newbee here, so I want to make sure I am right. When you engage the starter two things happen; first your pinion gear comes out coming in contact with the flywheel, then spins correct? Well if I am looking at the distand of the flywheel to the backing plate (where the starter mounts) and the offset of both the original OEM starter (that did not work) and the offset of the Powermaster, I would come to the conclusion that the pinion gear for the powermaster would be in contact all of the time. I should have seen this earlier, but another lesson learned, I assumed the Powermaster tech new exactly what he was talking about. I never took another look.

Take look at these pics, tell me what you think. By looking at the mounting plate and the current position of the pinion gear, the pinion gear would be coming in contact with the flywheel all of the time. So.....if my theory is correct the OEM should have worked, I guess back to the OEM...SO the Powermaster website and tech is wrong, but why? And now, what if I can not get the damn OEM to work? I guess I could go to the small block forum and see what others are using.