Thanks SO MUCH for all the help.

i checked the two CPS sensors and found it is a 3 pin sensor, so it's a powered sensor.

my old sensor was replaced a year ago for reliability, the newer one had what appeared to have some small 'insignificant' marks on it's plastic casing from the recent incident.

after the starter gear shattered I had put the old one back as a test but then replaced it with my newer one after seeing no change.

I checked both sensors with a meter, found continuity on two of the pins but no connectivity with the others and I read 184 ohms between those pins on the accident damaged sensor, and 252 ohms on the old sensor which had not been involved in the accident. -this is with sensor unplugged and just connected to the meter.

after I had straightened the flex plate with the metal windows,it would not start. (it had 3-4 dents with about 1/8" deviation and about an inch or so long because part of the starter gear was rolling around in there)

Today I replaced the sensor a second time with my old one and it started

to sum up it had a bent flex plate and a bad sensor and the trick was to fix both issues and not just 1.


It was much easier to straighten the flexplate from under the car than to pull the tranny or the engine.

I did not read codes yet and i did not try to probe the sensor but if others wanted to.. If you have a computer with a soundcard there are free oscilloscope programs that run in windows and utilize the microphone imputs.
I yried one before and it worked well.

with my old 70's scope you can't freeze the screen but one could do that in windows. it's a good use for an old desktop computer. i wouldnt use a new computer for this but you can probably put a 1 meg resistor on the probe to protect it from loading the circuit.

Eureka ! - it starts fine now so thanks again to all who replied.
Phil