I had 1 day of silence from the starter after cleaning and re greasing the gears in it.
the whrrrrr howl is back but not as loud as before. I was pretty liberal with the grease but am wondering if I should have really packed it in there.

how much grease did the rest of you use?.

 

Did mine a good 5 years ago and have not had a problem since. I used just a very little bit (just enough to coat the gears) of AMSOIL Series 2000 synthetic grease.

 

hmmm I may try another grease then. I used some lithium based stuff.

 

well I took the starter back out a few days ago . and took it apart again. and I really slathered the grease in there this time. I mean I really stuffed the gears full of grease. after putting it all back together. a 30 min total job start to finish.
no more howl/

 

I did the fix last week. Mine was more the bendix action up and down that was sticky more than the gears. I put just a bit of caliper slide grease on my gears and sprayed the shaft with tri-flow then air hosed the excess off. I didn't want to remove the c-clip and take it completely apart, and didn't have a good tool for it.

 

You know, I tried this grease trick twice, and it worked for a few months each time. The third time, I decided to just go out and pay the man for a reman motor (but not from Nissan; they wanted like $300 for their reman). Turns out if you have an early Max (95-96), they had a weak 8-tooth starter motor that's been superseded by a 10-tooth motor. All you can get now is the 10-tooth motor. It meshes just fine with the old flywheel, and seems to spin the engine over faster than even a regreased old motor did. If you have a later Max with a 10-tooth starter, it might not make as much difference.