New starter and batt.

so today after a couple of weeks of trying to ignore the grinding noise coming from the early starts or just about anywhere, i finaly decided to change the starter. For me, it was a PITA to try to get acces to the starter so after an inspection of the area i decided to take off the intake manifold to have an easy and more comfortable way to R&R the starter. Everything was going great except for when it came to remove the manifold and i ran into some careless trouble. Also once the manifold was removed i found new problems that needed to get fixed but after 4 1/2 hours under the hood the darn thing was finally replaced and boy does it make a difference! car starts like it just left the dealership
so first it was just me and the 2.8, took me a while but finally located starter( right under the intake manifold/ above the tranny close to the firewall) under this area

to start i removed all the intake boxes and tubes all the way to the throttle, then i disconnected all the sensors that connect to the manifold and unscrewed the wiring harness from the throttle. Some of the connections can be seen others felt so i used one of those mirror pen thingy to spot all the connections.

so after all these things are taken off i simply took off the throttle body and set it aside.

after this i just simply removed the harnes from the injectors and moved all the wires off to a safe side and took off the 9 nuts that hold down the manifold

and this is where all the good stuff began to appear first i wasn't able to remove the manifold after i was sure i had taken everything off. i had read that you had to wrestle it a little to get it off but my wrestle started to get into a fight so after a few minutes to calm down and curse at the fold, i took and look under them where the throttle used to be and stupid me there was still a bolt on there

closeup of the removed nut

so when i had them off to the side i had a clear view of the starter but also a clear view of this

old crappy lines that i had to replace before moving on. the one on top was the one that freaked me out the most.

after the quick fix with new lines it was easy to remove the old starter with a #12 torx socket, i did this by lifting the car and using this setup to squeeze the socket from behind the tranny and slowly removing the screws.














this is what it looked like after i was done

everything from there was just simple reverse steps
The new starter with the feed cables attached (of course i removed the batt connections)


just dropped the manifold back into place, making sure all the lines were properly connected here i am putting the throttle back into place. tight squeeze!

everything back together

and here is a close up of the new starter installed.

just a pic of the new starter before it went in.

so after hardwork the car sounds great and starts right up. of course this is just a quick view of that i did. there are many more pictures that i took but i will only edit and show a step by step if anyone really wants me to because this is the way i did it and i don't know if there is an easier way to do it other than dropping the tranny but that's not easy at all for me so at the end of the fun day i just decided to get a new batterie to complement the starter and to make sure that i know what went into the car so far. so what do you guys think of my fun field day?

Nice job. Thanks for the pictures and directions. I'm sure this will be helpful for others.

there are way more pics like i said in the previous post but only if someone really needs them i made sure i got everything this time

you da man!

Man! I'm feeling dreadful when the day will come. But I have to give you two thumbs up and thank you for sharing the knowledge.

well, damn. That looks like quite the task....

My starter has been going for a while now. Hopefully it will keep trucking for a few more months until I have some personal expenses behind me, as after looking at your DIY I think I'll be paying for labor along with the part.

Originally Posted by Gopher2k

well, damn. That looks like quite the task....

My starter has been going for a while now. Hopefully it will keep trucking for a few more months until I have some personal expenses behind me, as after looking at your DIY I think I'll be paying for labor along with the part.

I found this doing research for this (nearly intelligible) post just now:
- i meesed up on starter

Up until now, AFAIK, only cn90 & Takechan had good starter-motor DIYs.

So others benefit, I'll add this one that I just found to the bestlinks list!

- Where is the starter motor located (1) & an M52 starter motor DIY (1) (2) & the BMW TIS (1) and an E38 740iL starter motor DIY (1) (2) & how to remove the M52 starter motor without removing the intake manifold (1) (2) & what special tools are needed (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) & where is the starter motor relay (1) (2)

Photo by cn90!