[sixxty7]

here an update. did as george said. with the with the starter grounded and resting on a jack stand. i turned the ignition on. sure enough everything worked fine. starter turned on when i turned the key. and disengaged when i turned off the key. everything seemed ok. so i disconnect battery cables. and mount starter to block. sure enough when i hooked up the battery cables, the starter engages. no keys in the ignition. i am starting to think i have a short. so i take out positve cable for inspection. nothing wrong that i can see. the harness looks ok as well. theres only two things different from before. the positve cable, as well as the harness wires now are going through the ram air cable tube. i also had the harness itself modified to ram air specs. m@h did this modification. its their harness. i am using a 1gauge wire for both battery cables. its a very tight fit going through that tube, but it does go through. i made sure none of the terminal wires to the starter were touching! everything semed ok until i mounted the starter back on the block. what do you guys think?

[sixxty7]

can,t figure this one out. i took off starter again, to check harness and battery cable. they both look fine. but this time i rerouted the positive cable. instead of going through the tube with the harness wires, i routed it outside of the tube. made sure starter wires were clear of each other. put the battery cables on the battery, and guess what, the starter didnt engage like it did before. put key in ignition and proceeded to crank up the car. no problems. i have the 1 gauge wire for the positve. i am thinking that it is too tight in that cable tube. 1 gauge wire with the harness wires. its pretty hard too get them both in that tube. maybe thats my issue, but all the wires are in like new condition. any thoughts on this? thanks again for the help.

[hillpc]

sixxty7, sounds like you have a short from positive juice onto your purple S wire somewhere. From the battery cable or the other red wire. I would go in yet again and inspect all of those cables with a fine-toothed comb and a bright light. If one shorts to the metal tube (if it's grounded), you could make a giant metal-melted mess, maybe start an insulation fire, and destroy your battery. In my opinion, there's no way the wires just being that close together, insulated, can inductively transfer enough current to energize the solenoid.

6t7gto and george k, thanks for that line of thinking about mechanical hanging up making the starter not stop. 6t7gto, you didn't hijack the thread; this could have been closely related. I just checked and the snap ring is fine, the starter parts all look good and the solenoid looks good too. I've disassembled and reassembled it all. It runs fine on the garage floor; 15 times so far. Since the "starter won't shut off" problem only happens with the starter in the car, I've concluded the starter gear is probably vertically too close to the flexplate, making it bind too tight for the solenoid return spring to pull it back out while running. I'll do the paperclip check advised in numerous other starter posts. I have a single 1/16" shim in there so far; this has seemed to cure a hot start problem that occurred earlier with no shim.

I've seen so much good advice in many of these posts from george k he should be called "master guru" or something...

[Old Goat 67]

That's what we do call him, but he would rather we donate to his retirement fund!