Repairing pony starter, two gears become one

All,

The teeth on the starter gear on one of my D2's was chewed up. I bought a new bendix for the starter and installed it. I also bought a used housing assembly with the entire gear/pulley arrangement that the bendix meshes with. This assembly was off an older model. Unfortunately, the casting for the housing was significantly different. The assembly fit the pony fine, but it wouldn't allow the dash to be reinstalled. I wasn't going to cut a hole in the dash to make it fit and the internal parts were different so I couldn't just swap the good gear into my housing. So, I figured I would have to find different parts. After thinking about it I came up with a plan. I threw the gears in my lathe and went to work. I cut the hub out of the good replacement gear and made it into a ring gear. Then turned the teeth off my bad gear until the outside diameter of the hub had about a thou press fit with the ring gear I made. Next I pressed them together. After I pressed the two parts together I checked the runout it my lathe. It was within a couple thou. Then I fired up my welder and glued it together in three spots on both sides. Lastly, I threw the welded gear back into the lathe and cleaned the welds up. These gears were hard hard hard..... The gears just laughed at me when I tried high speed steel. It was pretty much carbide the whole way. It took me the better part of the day to get this done because I couldn't take heavy cuts. But it's done and I think it turned out pretty good.

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Nice work there, I see no reason why that shouldn't work just fine, but let us know how it performs. I know exactly what type of fitment problems you're referring to when talking about the two styles of starting drives, I've ran across the same issues on my machines. Again good job, that sure beats hacking and cutting other perfectly good parts to try to make something fit.

I'd say we were successful. I put it back together. The pony started and there was no grinding of gears. The Bendix engaged perfectly. I started up the diesel and took it for a ride. Now if I could just get the left steering clutch to break loose I'd be all set.