Alright, I’m sure that I’m going to look like a dumbass here in short order, but the story is that when I dropped the engine back in and turned on the Perko switch the starter started smoking hot and fast as well as the ground lug on the back of the engine. Standard 7.4 mag MPI wire harness, the batteries or other wiring were never disconnected so it’s literally hooking up the ground cable to the bellhousing and batter to the + lug on the starter, yellow and red to the solenoid. Nothing else in the wiring has been changed except I did add a fuse box to the transom with the relay wire tapped into the purple wire on the cannon plug, but that all seemed fine.

I checked the ground connection with an ohm meter meter and showed a solid connection. Disconnected the power cable from the starter and tested that to the to the block and showed 12v. Ohm metered the starter to block, relay to block, relay to starter with no shorts.

Aside from brain cells, what am I missing here?

Its a Powermaster XS starter.

Excellent suggestion, so I re-clocked the cables straight down with the same result and can feel 3/16” clearance from them to anything else.

I did an ohm check and all checked out, but it may be for the best as I don’t think this one is marine certified.

Anybody have a preference on starters? 10:1 Cr. Bbc

I’m not making fun of you. Are you sure you have the polarity correct
3 pointstar

Thats a very fair question at this point, but yea, ground to the block and red from the Perko switch to the large lug.

I took it to Oreilly’s to have it tested but needed to cross reference it to something in stock so they can enter particular values into the testing machine, but couldn’t get enough info.

Im already ordering a new starter as this one came on the boat but not uscg certified, but I’d like to pinpoint the issue before frying a new starter.