More starter stories ...

It looks like the car we are talking about is an '89. The change over year for the starters was '88. The earlier starter ('75-'87) is the one that earned the good repuatation as rock solid. I have only replaced two on very high mileage Volvos. The replacements were both rebuilts that were still working fine when I passed them on to my kids or sold them.

Now the starter on my '90 starter(should be the same as your '89 starter)was a little different story. At about 135,00 miles I replaced the starter with a life time rebuilt starter. Then the replacement went bad about three months later. I put on a second one (they are lifetime so it was free). I had to replace that one too within 2 or 3 months. The thrid one was a charm and is still going strong three years later. However, it may not have been just a matter of poor qulaity control in the lifetime rebuilds. All during the 5 or 6 months that I was going through the rebuilds I had a "bucking" (seemed like a kick back against the starter)when I started the car. The car was hard to start during this time and eventually I could not get the car to start even though the starter turned the engine over (this was just after I put in the thrid replacement starter. To fix the no-start problem I replaced that sensor pickup on the bellhousing (couldn't find it in my Volvo books so I'm not sure of its name -- impulse sender?). Guess what? The bucking kickback problem went away and I have had three years of touble-free starting since then. This seemed like it was just a conincidence--but I wonder. Not sure of any connection between the two but it would be easy to see how the bucking kickback (possibly related to the impact-sender porblem) could be hard on starters and drastically shorten their lives.

One other comment . . . Although I have generally been satisfied with rebuilt components (starters, alternators, etc.), I do look for real Volvo/Bosch replacement parts that look somewhat new on cars in U-Pull places. Although U-Pull places mostly have pretty used up tired old cars, some of these cars were maintained at dealerships with new parts right up to the event that sent them to the U-Pull yard.

Mike