It’s always fun to jack up the car and crawl around underneath. You see all kinds of new things.
Say, those floor pans really have rotted away, haven’t they? And what’s this, power steering fluid? Wonder where that’s coming from. Hey, look–the transmission cooler lines have been tied up with zip ties back here. Well, more stuff to add to the list.
The starter came out pretty easily. I remember doing this job many times on a 71 Cougar I used to own. I had headers on that car and they were a pain to work around; the bolts on the t-bird were a lot easier to get to.
The only thing that slowed me down was removing the lower bolts first. The top bolt is much harder to get to and easier to remove if the lower bolts are still in. The last bolt to come out will bind as the starter begins to fall out, so make the last bolt the easiest one to reach. I had to put a lower bolt back in to get the top bolt out.
I made a photojournal of the removal process.
The rebuilt starter is due at the store Tuesday. Look for the follow up post (and hopefully a running car) that evening.