Goofycat wrote: It would ordinarily take only about ten minutes. . . . . .
![Approve [^:]](./images/smilies/icon_smile_approve.gif)
No such thing as a 10-minute job.
Last weekend I changed the electric fan on my oil cooler -- a 10-minute job.
And, that's all it would have been until I dropped one of the mounting nuts and watched it bounce around on top of my starter motor before disappearing into what should have been an impossibly small hole in the starter gearcase.
So, the "10-minute job" included pulling the starter, taking apart the gearcase, recovering the seeing-eye nut, and putting it all together again.
Incidentally, when I had the starter on the work bench I tried maybe 50 times to bounce a nut into that hole. No matter how hard I tried to do it on purpose I couldn't make it happen.
