Originally Posted by barry12345

I am not sure why a civil discussion on starters has degenerated this far. . Many minor internal changes inside this series of starters may have been modified to improve costs or performance over their span of run.

Larger earlier starters may just have been much more rugged at one time acounting for the larger case size on the earlier four cylinder I90 starters for example. Or they were six volt units perhaps is another good possibility.

I think starters where never in house manufactured by mercedes. I often wonder why mercedes engineers did not have a decompression arrangement to get the speed of engine rotation a lot higher before trying to start the engines. even if only on a few cylinders. It was pretty obvious their design of engine was not too responsive to starting in colder conditions. Maybe the presence of glow plugs eliminated this as a possibility. Even the option of drilling and tapping the intake manifold for really hot input air to start on from a couple of more glow plugs was never utilized. It may still be a worthwhile modification for some of our older engines.

Mercedes to me had from time to time had some great engineers in their organization. Whatever happend over time to make them less common must have been obvious to their organization.

Some of their research and development seems to still be good. Their execution to production levels may be somehow flawed though. Their attempts to modify problems in production runs seems not that common anymore either. They used to address common problems from the field a lot faster at one time. Running changes in current production where common in the day.