About a year ago, the insulation in the stator windings of my 34 Plymouth starter deteriorated to the point that the windings shorted out. I had a '70 Pontiac starter laying around and discovered that the rotor and the stator was the same size as my 34 Plymouth. I was able to use the 34 Plymouth armature and snout with the 70 Pontiac stator housing and brushes. All I had to do was to redrill the index hole on the 34 Plymouth snout so the two long bolts would miss the stator windings and use a Ford solenoid because I was unable to mount the foot operated switch to the stator housing. This worked for awhile, then the insulation on the armature windings was also deteriorated and the windings shorted out. When that happened the copper winding overheated and expanded out of the rotor, then the pole pieces smeared the copper onto the rotor. This can be seen in the first attachment. The Pontiac rotor wouldn't just swap in because the bendix and front part of the shaft where the bendix rides was different than the 34 Plymouth. So I decided to cut the front shaft off the 34 rotor and weld it to the Pontiac rotor. I built the jig pictured, cut the shaft with a hack saw, ground a tapper on the shaft for better penetration and used a piece of copper to protect the spline from the welding. It works great, and the 12 volt starter really spins the little 6 cyl. Kipp
This is the kind of stuff a old local starter & generator by the name of Bobby did day in and day out for many years,,he could take parts from almost anything and make them work like new. I remember on of the work benches had parts piled up 3 foot high and he still knew where to look for parts. HRP
The Jalopy Journal
