Well last weekend the starter in my V went... yes after only me having the car 2 weeks... The dealer i bought the car from said to send them the bill... we'll see how that goes. but anyways, its all fixed now. When i tried unbolting the battery cable from the dead starter, the whole post snapped off the solenoid and you could see all rust and corrosion inside. But I found out something interesting, apparently the last shop that did a starter on this car, used the wrong starter. They put one in from either a corvette, f body or LS-based type truck, not the correct one for the V. Problem was that the dead starter was about an inch longer than the correct one and it the tight spaces that 1 inch caused a ton of issues. I had to first remove the cat converter to see if that would make more room... nope. And when i did that, of course 1 bolt on each cat flange snapped... joy. After trying every which way to get the starter out, i realized it wasn't happening. I ended up taking the starter apart by removing the 2 long screws that hold the starter motor to the nose section. By doing that i could pull them apart and basically take it out in 2 pieces. Once it was out, i realized the last shop also cut off the factory connector for the solenoid, so i had to make something up to work instead, you can see the red wire in the pics. I used a blade terminal connector stuck into where the connector should go, them used RTV silicone around it to seal it up. then I cut the terminal off the wire which the last shop put on and connected that to the red wire i installed. The new starter fit perfectly with no clearance issues at all. Even if the Cat was in place, i could swap that starter in 15 min easily.
Since the catback exhaust was unbolted now already.. i decided to install the Magnaflow catback system i had bought. That just involved drilling out the 2 broken studs on the cat flanges and using regular bolts in their place. That worked out fine. I love the sound of it now, not loud really(still needs to break in) but a great tone and definitely gave me some more power.
Here are some random pics of this whole insane process....
