• Back to Reviews MEAN GREEN STARTING POWER By Rick Shandley • Off-Road Magazine At 12 pounds, the Mean Green starter is about seven pounds lighter than the stock Ford big-block unit it replaced, and a 1/3 smaller. Aside from a 4.4: 1 gear reduction, what makes this small package different from a factory starter is the use of roller. bearings instead of bushings. Roller bearing supports are used at both ends of the 3-inch tool-steel driveshaft, and at three positions on the armature in the high-speed motor. Also, this starter uses an integrated solenoid for heat resistance, and a 360-degree adjustable face plate. Made from aircraft-quality billet aluminum, the nose cone can be adjusted in 20-degree increments to fit your application. By removing the Allen-head bolts holding the nose cone, we could rotate the starter so the solenoid was at its farthest point away from the header for clearance. Although the integrated solenoid is heat resistant, rotating the starter motor away from the header will prevent starter fading or hot starts. Mean Green starters are available for most applications. We ran the Mean Green starter for several weeks and enjoyed on-tap cranking power in fair weather and in icy and wet conditions. With a naturally aspirated engine, it only took a split-second flick of the key to start a fire in the 460. Stopping and starting the motor many times throughout a given day presented no shortage of cranking power from the Mean Green. In fact, the sound the Mean Green makes is like an instantaneous sound bite from a skill saw as it blurps to life - it's fun and it doesn't sound stock. As an example of the Mean Green's adaptability to small spaces, Casey Scranton at CGS Motorsports in Fullerton, CA, installed the L&L Products Ultra-Flow headers and performed the necessary plumbing to join the headers to a previously installed aftermarket muffler system. If there was going to be trouble with the fit, these headers would bring it out. Fifty-state legal and nickel-coated inside and out, the headers are made of 14-gauge, mandrel-bent tubing. There was little room between the frame rails and the starter for the header tubes on our F-350. Therein lies one large advantage of the small starter. If your truck has an automatic transmission, be sure to measure the shift linkage clearance from the exhaust pipe with the transmission engaged in first gear. The first gear position will mark the furthest travel of the tranny linkage towards the exhaust tubing coming off the header on the driver's side of the truck. This clearance is necessary for proper transmission operation. To further bolster the package and battle the added heat, we installed a set of 8mm Champion Truck Wires with zirconia enhanced ceramic sleeves and installed a set of Champion Copper Plus spark plugs (PN #930 RV92YC). Road testing the high-output starter, Ultra-Flow headers and heat resistant Champion Truck Wires proved a good combination. We drove several hours in one sitting to give the headers plenty of time to heat the starter. We repeated the process of starting and stopping the engine throughout an afternoon without experiencing starter fade. In general, the Mean Green starter provided lots of cranking power, it looks sharp, and we expect to get at least 35,000 starts out of it. Starting now. MG Industries, Inc. 3 Imaging Lane Derry, PA 15627 P: (724) 694-8290 • F: (724) 694-8292 info@mean-green.com