My sweat fest thankfully had a happy ending although it took a lot longer to get there than I would have hoped given the thermally challenging conditions in the interior of the boat. Once I got the behemoth Hitachi starter motor out of the tiny orifice things started falling in to place pretty quickly. I took it to the local Annapolis PASCO who had it for a week and were able to replace the solenoid , and rebuild some of the internal components to make it sing like Janis Joplin once again.
Another two sweaty hours later, I had the starter and the rest of the components reinstalled and to my great relief, the engine sprang to life on the first push of the starting button. Whew.
Now I get to put the rest of this thing together and possibly sail this year.
