Aaah, well you know I guess it's just one of those things. I just went thru something like this very recently. Picked up an 88' that *seemed* like it had tranny & flywheel problems. Very hard to start, starter kept hitting the flywheel even when it was manually rotated 7 or 8 times. When it DID start it would rev to 3K+ but only move at 6 or 7 mph. With the inspection plate off the teeth didn't look TOO bad but they did show wear and I figured that was evidence enuf.
I picked up a junkyard tranny & when I pulled the existing tranny out of the truck what I discovered was that my flywheel had broken into two pieces. It had cracks between each & every crankshaft bolt and you could see where it had broken into an inner flywheel (the part bolted to the crank) and an outer flywheel (the part bolted to the torque converter). All of a sudden the hard starting made sense as well as the fact that once it DID start very little of the engine's power was being transferred to the transmission because the outer flywheel was bolted to the torque converter while the inner flywheel was bolted to the crankshaft and the two were no longer physically connected, it was just an interference fit
While this doesn't really HELP you in any way just understand that flywheels DO have a way of going bad. I believe it was Bidi who also recently posted a photo of HIS bad flywheel.
You'll NEVER get the tranny shop to admit that they saw a bad flywheel and ignored it, so I'd just drop that one. Maybe they noticed it and maybe they didn't. Maybe it was fine back then and maybe your starter mauled it in the past few weeks. Who knows. Bottom line here is that you now have a bad flywheel and the ONLY fix is going to be to drop the tranny and replace it. Ford wants about $97 for a new one (believe me, I ck'd w/them just 3 months ago). I got mine from the boneyard for free, but I was also buying a tranny from them so they threw it in being the nice guys that they are. I'd guess $20 would be a reasonable price for a used one, but that's just me & other guys may have other opinions. Just be sure you get one for your engine 302 or 351 and it should be stamped AOD. I can post photos if that helps any, just be sure to get the correct one because otherwise the engine won't be properly balanced and it'll shake like a dickens.
