I’ve been working on getting a 246 Dino GT back on the road, and another thing we needed to address was the starter. It was working intermittently, so I had to pull it out to take look at it. What seemed like a relatively easy task soon became apparent a lot more parts had to come off to get the starter out!

The arrow shows the starter unbolted, behind the left rear wheel, but the body of the starter wouldn’t clear the exhaust manifold. As was the theme of this car: in order to remove the starter, the exhaust manifold had to come out. In order to pull the exhaust manifold, the coolant expansion tank and the parking brake mechanism had to come out. To pull the parking brake bracket out, the brake cable had to be pulled out,…You get the picture of how my morning went!

Although I have a shop manual for a Dino, it was still a good piece of insurance to photograph the parking brake setup so I could put everything back the way I found it.

The USA spec exhaust manifold came with these insulated covers that rust away pretty quickly. These were surprisingly intact, but barely cleared the engine compartment.

I finally reached what was obstructing the release of the starter from the engine. The air pump injectors that are part of the emissions system extended just far enough from the engine block to trap the starter in place. With these removed, the starter came out. Now we can actually fix the starter!