I am beginning to suspect there might be more different kinds of OE (or OE-alike) starters built to the '62-'02 Chrysler RWD pattern than any other application in the automotive world. As if that Mitsubishi-made '05-'08 Ram (5.7 V8 with manual transmission) item weren't a random enough find, they get weirder. Story Time with Uncle Dan!
I first saw a starter like this a long time ago on eBay:
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And he goes "Uhhhh…yeah, it is! WTAF?"
Neither he nor I can find evidence of this starter's existence. None on eBay, none in pages and pages of results for starter searches on Hollanderparts and car-part.com, none in any-year factory parts cattledogs, none in aftermarket cattledogs, not even a mention of it on RockAuto, just nothing. Best either of us can come up with is a faint hint of a reman-industry number, which nobody ever seems to have cattledogged or stocked. No bill of materials, no applications, no nothing, and always with a redirect to the (Nippon)Denso PMGR starter everybody already knows about, the kind factory-installed starting in '88 when they quit using the Chrysler-built OSGR starter.
Eventually I figure this is just another piece of evidence that a squirrel or something got into one of those particle colliders while it was running and shunted us all into »gestures at everything« this, and I'd seen a starter from another timeline. Either that, or a glitch in the matrix.
Still, it kept nagging at me. The pics in the eBay listing were real ones, not drawings or renderings. Things like this are like loose teeth to me, or ravelling threads: I cannot resist picking at them.
Just shortly ago, instead of working on a project with a looming deadline (it's looming even larger now) I picked at this mystery again. Don't recall what subchamber of a late-night rabbit hole I was in when I stumbled onto the actual story of this starter: it was used as original equipment in Mexico on at least '94ish to '98ish Dodge Ram trucks and vans with 3.9 V6s and 5.2 and 5.9 V8s. Locally made by Bosch in Mexico:
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I didn't like giving up my alternate-timeline explanation, which was kind of giving me hope.
So I went digging further, and found some OE Bosch numbers, donned my virtual hip waders and went sloshing through AliExpress, and there I found – just imagine my shock and surprise – that new starters of this type are being made in China. On that subject, my rotating-electrics guy says "They've figured out proper metallurgy and surface treatment, so their starters and alternators are a whole lot better than they used to be; generally they're fine".
And now I had more numbers to plug into web searches, and with one of them I found a US parts vendor listing this starter, new, at a friendly price. I ordered one and had it sent to a friend in the states, asking that he put it on one of his Slant-6 cars and make me some videos. And here they are:
Bosch-type starter cranks with ignition disabled
Bosch type starter cranks, then starts engine
Wow, that is really fast cranking. So fast I wondered if maybe this were actually a PMDD starter, not PMPGR. I showed the vids to my electrics guy, and he said nope, it's a gear-reduction type; he could tell by the design details. "The basic design is no different than a Mitsubishi or a Hitachi or Marelli or Valeo or Motorcraft. Perfectly serviceable. They will pretty much all last longer than we have the cars."
I went back to that parts vendor and found the price had quadrupled.
Guess mine was the only order they'd ever had for it, and it made them go "Awcrap, how'd that price get in there?".PMPGR: Permanent Magnet, Planetary Gear Reduction
OSGR: Offset Gear Reduction
PMGR: Permanent Magnet Gear Reduction
PMDD: Permanent Magnet, Direct Drive
DD: Direct Drive
Other than bragging rights, this kind of extreme starter power is unlikely to be actually needed on a Slant-6 application; for high-compression V8s I can see it being a real nice alternative to spending hundreds of dollars on an aftermarket hot rod starter (Powermaster, etc).