Starter: you are outta here!

I am going to cheat here. You see, I want to take the starter out of my Saab to have it checked. But, before I did it in my own car, I went to the local u-pull yard and tried on one of their cars. Among other reasons is that even though my own car is turbo, I thought I should be humble and start with a N/A. The bottom line is pretty simple: the non turbo car has much less hoses and other objects (like a turbo) around and over the cover. Once I feel I can do that in the N/A car, I can then try it in a turbo one... like my convertible.

So, let's first start by finding all those little bolts that hold the clutch cover in the car. I will be marking the 13mm ones in red and the 10mm ones in green. So, we have the 13mm on the left side of the cover, on the bottom, which bolts to the transmission: Then we have the bolts on the right side. The 13mm is gone and the 10mm bolts to the back of the cover into the engine block. Actually, all the 10mm ones bolts into the block.
Back on the left side we have another 10mm bolt. It is a bit below the starter and holds a bracket the positive battery wire that feeds the starter sits on.
The last bolt is a 10mm that sits on the top a bit to the right side of the engine.
Now that we have those bolts off, let's see if we figure out how to remove the cover. When I first tried to remove it, I could not because it would get stuck on the metal bracket shown below under the curvy pipe. There had to be a better way!
And, it seems there was! The way I found easiest to work, at least on that N/A car, was to pull off the cover from the bottom on the right side of the car and then rotate it towards the left, as indicated by the lousy red arrow below.
I do not know how better to describe it, but it worked and the cover came out rather nicely, exposing the clutch assembly for all to see:
Now we can get to the starter and what bolts to it. How about if we start with its wiring? A 13mm socket easily removed the positive wire that goes back to the battery. This is probably a good time to have the battery disconnected before attempting to get to the nut.
Then, there is the small wire that goes to the solenoid. It also needs to go. Once those are taken care of, we now need to unbolt the starter from the engine. Two 13mm bolts, backed by 17mm nuts, hold the starter on the front:
Here is a picture of the bolt/nut pair closest to the head:
and of the one that is furthest from the head:
On the back we have a plate that is then mounted to the side of the engine block with two 10mm bolts.
I began by the front bolts. The first one was the one closest to the head. I used a 13mm 1/4" socket (green) and a 17mm closed end wrench (red) on it:
The one farthest from the head I ended up using the same 13mm socket as before and a 17mm 3/8" drive socket instead of the closed end wrench. Reason is that it would just not fit.
Now, we go to the rear 10mm bolts. A short 1/4" drive socket took care of them rather easily... after I pulled the coolant hose away from the bracket:
Then, I tried to yank the starter out. It would not move. I yanked on it harder! Nothing. Since I do not know any curses in Swedish, I grabbed one of my tiniest flathead screwdrivers and persuaded the starter to move.
The next step -- how to take starter out of car -- I have no pictures of because my camera ran out of battery. But, let me try to describe it. After the starter was loose, I moved it back and down. What I had in mind was to eventually turn it so its bracket (it is still attached to the starter) would be pointing down and then get it out like that. And that is what I did. Once I had the idea of getting it out by pulling it down, I had it out in like 3 minutes or so.

Technically this episode ends here, but I had one last event. I took it to a local auto store to have them test it. Something interesting happen: when they had the wire that would excite (woohoo!) the solenoid connected to the same connector as it was in the car, starter would not work. Then we found another connector on the other side (inboard to the engine) of the solenoid. This time when power was applied the solenoid engaged and starter turned rather smoothly. Something very weird is going on here...