My starter went bad and stopped working . I was in a hurry so instead of ordering from rock auto I bought a duralast starter from autozone. I installed the duralast starter and when I started it up it sounded like crap . The gear was not meshing with my flywheel properly . I took out the starter and checked out my flywheel and they were a little worn on the ends so I thought to myself “oh crap, here we go … “ . I decided to rule out everything else before assuming it was the condition of the flywheel that was causing the problem. So I started by checking the battery and it was good, around 10 volts under load . So the next thing I did was spray the gear with some lithium grease and that changed nothing . So then I tried a starter shim and that made it even worse.i pulled out the starter and compared it to the original one more time and noticed that the shaft on the duralast was an 8th inch longer , So then I decided to just return the starter and try a different manufacturer. The next day I got an “ultima” brand starter from oriellys and it matched the original , so installed it and bingo, problem solved , starts right up and sounds great . So the lesson there was do not trust the website and assume a part will match and also , duralast is garbage . Hope this information helps

 

Glad you got it sorted out... A "lifetime" warranty means nothing if you've already paid double for it and you need to change it every other year...The local autoparts store is my last resort if Rockauto doesn't have it.. That site seems to be my "price to compare" starting point and go from there...

 

Autozone's lifetime warranty often means you'll be replacing it repeatedly for the lifetime of the vehicle. Their remanf quality is pretty bad.