Lincoln SA-200 Starter: repair or replace?

You could try turning the commutator smooth before giving up on it. Undercut the insulation in the slots between the bars with a hacksaw blade.

jsw

I will think about it. It looks really bad.

What about "aftermarket" replacement statrers, are they any good?

I bet if you can pull the rotor out and mount it on your lathe you could turn the commutator down to an acceptable finish. Add some new brushes and a general cleaning and the starter will probably work just fine. After all the starter runs for like 10 seconds each time you start the engine, so in personal use the starter run time per year is minutes.

what's your time worth? You should rpelace the bearings and bendix plus a few other wear parts at the same time. My local rebuild shop does this for $100 with warranty and the individual parts cost $50. No brainer for me, I even rebuild starters whenever it comes off for any other reason. i think the savings in grief and batteries cover it.

Karl

Karl, so with parts and cost, it is $150?

if so, I can get a "OEM replacement" starter for about that much and not even drive to the rebuild shop.

How good are those replacement starters?

Pete, look at this picture.

That sucker is DONE. But since it is quite possibly the highest production starter EVER built, replacements should be readily available at a good price. Lots of used ones floating around too.

What about this one?

This one:

Do you think that my old starter has a core value?

That is not repairable at any reasonable cost. The commutator segments are completely shot and there is no way you can recut it. It looks like the segments are burned off on the ends too.

I never had any trouble with the replacement starters.

John

Bingo. Turning can be on a lathe or on a pair of wooden V-blocks with a wood block and a strip of crocus or emery. They're not too picky.

I did that with a lot of generators in me yout.

-- The general effect was exactly like a microscopic view of a small detachment of black beetles, in search of a dead rat. -- John Ruskin

Understatement.

Can you say "That starter is HISTORY!"? I knew you could.

Put it back together and pray for a core allowance. They might not if you left the endcap off.

-- The general effect was exactly like a microscopic view of a small detachment of black beetles, in search of a dead rat. -- John Ruskin

Well, so we have four people saying it is crap, and I agree.

I will call Napa tomorrow, if I can get what I want for $62 and they take my old starter for core, AND I can have it on Friday, I will be happy.

OK, I got it. I will get it from Napa, or a complete unit from ebay.

Now, my guess is that this starter is so bad, the welder is unusable with it. Perhaps, then, this is why the company where I bought it, stopped using it?

In other words, since this problem precludes use of the welder, then perhaps there are no other significant problems?

Am I making sense?

I am just saying, I would be unlikely to find two "showstopper" problems in any given machine.

I'm blessed. An old fella near me does the whole rebuild for $80 - $90 total but don't rush him. He can upgrade to better than new by putting in stronger field coils. He's done all my needs for over twenty years now. Not sure how good a person you can find in the big city. This is a perfect one man shop industry so there's quite a few to choose from.

Karl

I apply that test when buying used equipment too. It seems that when one part is so worn that the machine is unusable, several others may be close to failing. Accidental damage is different.

Then there was the arc welder I bought from a band roadie that had been dropped and the wheels bent, the control lever was weakly glued together and the clutch worn out, the fan was frozen, and a botched panel jack repair had shorted the secondary and smoked the winding. It was actually a fairly easy fix.

jsw

G'luck!

-- You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.? -- Ronald Reagan

I did with AutoZones in 2004-2006. A deluxe model (with the lifetime guarantee) would last about a year in my old F-150, and it usually started with 3 seconds of cranking. The Tundra takes under 1 second. I adore EFI! That original starter in the Ford lasted for 14 years and about 110k miles of mostly town driving with lots of starts.

Not necessarily. If the thing wouldn't start and the guy wore out 4 batteries trying, toasting the starter, that could be a symptom rather than the entire problem.

According to Occam, though, the odds are on your side.

-- You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.? -- Ronald Reagan

Yep, it certainly isn't great, but we aren't talking about space shuttle actuator motors here, it's just an engine starter. Turn 0.010" off of it and install new brushes and it will likely work fine for years.

If the company that owned the unit didn't do basic maintenance like replacing the starter brushes, that would imply that the unit probably didn't see much other maintenance either.