Last fall, one of the times I went to start the car, the starter motor didn't disengage and got shredded by the flywheel. I pulled the starter and pulled out all the scraps of metal from the bell housing and made sure the flywheel itself wasn't chewed up and put in a cheap NAPA clone and it fired up and ran fine, but I was having hot start issues. I would be fine when I started but after driving for more than 20 min, I would pretty much get stuck wherever I stopped until it cooled down, then it would fire up again just fine. I bought the CVR starter in the hopes that that would help with the hot start issues and since they sold a mini torque starter with the r terminal already there so I could just do an easy swap instead of having to wire in a diode.

I'm going to go ahead and say no At first I had the solenoid and relay wires crossed because of a stupid mistake using colored tape to mark the wires and the old connections for reference. Due to having blue tape on my solenoid wire and the the r terminal on the new starter having blue rubber housing on the terminal - I matched blue to blue instead of blue to solenoid terminal. I didn't get the engine to turn over at all when it was wired that way, surprise surprise! I swapped the wires so they were going to the correct terminals and then I was getting the car to turn over in start but then immediately die when I let the key back to run. Lots of googling and looking up old posts got the whole bad ballast resistor thing in my mind.

I think I wired the to the positive starter terminal, so I will move that to the bell housing

Will try this when I get a chance, but it won't be for a while as I don't have time to work on it until next weekend. I am a little worried that I'll mess something else up trying to split the resistor wire out from the positive lead wire as they're crimped together on the terminal but I can always replace with a new terminal I suppose.

With it wired in the wonky way that I have it right now, it does turn over and stay running, so shouldn't I at least be able to rule out a bad ignition switch?

I wired r straight to the coil because I mistakenly thought that was the resistor wire and I knew that the resistor wire terminates at the coil - I left the existing resistor wire intact at the coil because I didn't want to damage the positive wire by splitting it out and then just capped off the old wire at the r terminal. What I'm wondering now is where the r terminal wire should terminate? Does that go to the ignition or to the coil. I know there are 3 wires on the + coil - the positive and resistor wire that are crimped together and then a third. Is the third, the wire from the r terminal?

Thanks for all the additional troubleshooting!

 

When I tested voltage at the coil before this "fix" I was getting 12.6 v at the coil c+ in on. In my series of mistakes I don't think I ever actually disconnected the resistor wire, I left everything that was connected at the coil c+ and just added a new wire with the ballast patched in from the r terminal to the coil c+.