When I tried to get the coil to throw the solenoid by hooking it up
the way I thought I should, I get nothing; that is connecting the
body/ground to negative battery, and the power connection to to
positive battary; nothing happens even when you short the starter switch/relay stud to positive..

If you take the cap that holds the electrical connectors off the
coil, you see that there are only two connections going into the
coil. One which goes to the starter relay/switch stud actually
has two wired connected together which go into the coil. The
other wire goes to the positive battery power.

The only connection I found to make the solenoid coil react is
connecting the two wires going into the coil to positive and
negative battery. Then the solenoid goes off!

This doesn't make any sense to me because the one wire goes
to the main battery positive power stud; the two wires that go
into the coil together go to the starter relay/switch!!!

Now I've paid to have this starter 'rebuilt' a couple of times;
it didn't seem like they were really doing anything because it
fail within a years again. So I decided to clean it up myself.
Maybe it's wiring is no longer original?

It doesn't help that you have to unsolder a couple of connections
just to get the cap off, and there's no way to put it back together
because the starter relay stud is soldered to a wire with no slack.
I put a ring terminal on the starter relay stud under the cap on a
wire a couple inches long to give me enough slack to push the
relay stud through the cap and then screw the cap on, and solder
the ring terminal outside the cap on the main power stud to the
wire that goes through the cap to the ring terminal.

Is it supposed to be like this? Has this already been screwed over
sometime in the past?

Thanks, Jaimes Beam