Still no car work

I took advantage of the great weather of late to get some yard work done and actually played golf again for just the second time in 3 months. I still have the back yard to do but will try to get some stuff done on the Cobra this week.

Garage work

The only work I got done in the garage this week was to fix the broken garage door. I replaced this goofy little rod that holds the track in place at the door with a real honest to goodness nut and bolt. Works like a charm now. Gotta remember when I get to the later car building stage and end up short a 3/8" bolt where it went! In about 3 days when I get the rest of this grease off of my hands I will be very pleased.

Little accomplished

I did not get a lot done this week. I did move the shifter forward on the transmission, but I was not satisfied with the way it shifted then. It seems that it is too close now to have the rod move all the way to engage all 6 positions of the tranny. I need to spend a while under the car with an extra pair of hands working the shifter some to check it.

Towards the end of the week, I did fix something that has been wrong for months. The instructions on the front brake pads were so incomplete, I could not figure out how to get the anti-rattle clips put on. After talking with Paul a couple of weeks ago, I figured I would try again. I did figure it out, and here is a picture to prove it...


So now I put the brakes back together and the wheels back on. Makes me happier to see the car with its shoes on.

Favorite part of my house

I've lived in my house for over 20 years. I haven't really ever done anything to improve it, or really for that matter, to maintain it very well either. But there is one thing that I do really love about my house, and it was a surprise. When I bought the house, the utility room contained this old beaten-up sink right next to where the washing machine would go. For the first year or so, I actually used the sink with an old apartment sized washer designed to hook up to a faucet like it had rather than a regular water line like regular washers do. Here is a picture of it...


It has come in handy several times before for little things, and it has come in handy a few times during this car build. I use it constantly to clean up after working on the car. It is great for washing old dirty parts, I have used it when drilling things to easily wash away bits of metal, I've clamped things to it for various reasons, and it makes a great paper towel holder. But this week, it REALLY came in handy.

I decided to try to use an old cheap Harbor Freight butane torch that worked before, but did not work well last time I tried to use it. I was going to try to heat some metal to make bending it easier. So I filled the torch with butane and fired her up. The key word being FIRE! In filling it, butane had spilled/leaked out of the end of the torch and the whole damned thing caught fire in my hand when I lit it. Fortunately, I was working over the old trusty sink, so I just dropped it and let it burn itself out. I love that sink!

I got very close this week on fitting the shifter linkage into place with the cockpit tub, but close just won't cut it. I am about ready to give up and do some major changes to move the shifter forward and hopefully gain the needed clearance. Although I did learn this time that the there are actually three clearance problems and moving everything forward will only fix two of them. The third binding spot will still have to be addressed some other way.

Almost done with the transmission

I got a fair amount done this week on the transmission. I figured out how to get things back together from last week and I took out the valve body to make the modifications that will make the car shift better. A while back, I tore a gasket and needed to replace it, so I bought a kit that included the gasket but also consisted of a bunch of tiny springs to swap out for improved performance. It was a B&M shift kit that had really nice instructions for a change.

It is hard to document visually, but here are some pics along the way...

First, the opened up valve body itself.


This shows a bit of a side view, with a piston like thing. I had to take a couple of those apart to replace a spring.


Next is the separator plate. Several of the little holes here had to be drilled out to be larger.


Finally, here is one with the new gasket in place.


At that point, it was ready to go back in the transmission. Nathan and Kelly came over to help me with that and to help me do more test fitting of the cockpit. The only problem was that one of the little pistons seems to have something like a retaining clip or something hanging where I did not remember it before. It does not seem to be effecting the transmission operation, but I may take a picture of that and see what others online think.

The cockpit fitting went well. It is very very close to fitting now that the new shifter arm is in place. The rod rubs a little bit, but I still have a little room to play with making it work. One or two washers on one end should push it inbound enough to clear. The head of the bolt holding it in place is still too tight against the cockpit tub, so I may want to bend the arm just a tad to completely clear the tub.

This coming week, I will hopefully finish off the tweaks to the tranny stuff and be able to button that all up. I think I will also finish the touch-up of the frame rustproofing that I did last year. Working underneath as much as I have of late has really shown me how many areas got missed! And I may revisit my front brakes to see what it will take to get the anti-rattle clips on that should have been done last year.

Continuing nut problem

I have not worked much on the car of late, but when I did, I concluded that the replacement nut that I bought is the wrong size. It turns out it is metric. I should have known that; everything else on the tranny is too and the instructions that came with the replacement arm even said it was a 14mm nut. Oh well, simple enough to fix, right?

It turns out that Advance Auto Parts did not have any metric nuts that big. (They did read my check engine code on the Passat and I got away without spending a dime once we figured out that it was just a bad reading in the rain that falsely said the engine temperature was too high). So off to Home Depot, which only carried 12mm and 16mm. So off to Napa which had 14mm, but the wrong thread size. Grrrr. I was thinking I might have to go to Fastenal and buy a big package just to get the one that I need, but then the Napa guy suggested that I go to a tranny service place down the street and see if they had one they could sell me.

I went to Austin Transmission and talked to Jeff who took the part with him into the shop and came back 2 minutes later with a nut on it and said "Have a nice day". That was nice, even if it only costs a buck.

Eventually I got home and tried to figure out how to put everything back together, now that I have the right parts. I spent a half hour or so, but could not figure out how to get the interior linkage back in place. It fell out when I finally removed the old nut, and it is not exactly straight forward to get it back together. Nor are there any instructions for that piece, since it should not have fallen out to begin with. It wouldn't have except the tranny is in place and I am working upside down. I did find an old picture I took back on April 8th that seems to show what it should look like, so tomorrow I will tackle it again.

9/18 4:44pm

That is the exact moment when I defeated my arch nemesis. The one bolt that had kept me mired down on the build has finally been conquered.

Having failed in trying to work around the huge stock gear selector arm on the transmission, I needed to remove one nut to get it to come apart. It was a 13/16" nut that I had been able to take off once before, but that was when the transmission was out of the car and much easier to work with. Unfortunately, I somehow managed to over-tighten it when I put it back on months ago and was left with a terrible problem that could have set me back to the end of April.

To access the nut, I had to drop the transmission oil pan, remove the filter, remove the valve body and a retaining pin. Not fun, but do-able at least. That left me looking at the nut as seen in the center of this blurry picture.



To work on it, I had to lay on my back with the nut about 2 or 3 inches from the tip of my nose. There was no way to get a socket on it. I could barely get a flare nut wrench on it, but only in one location that did not let me get any real leverage and there was only about 1/16" possible movement of the wrench in the best case. I quickly began to round off the nut as it just would not budge. I needed to salvage everything around this nut so I could not do any easy cutting, and I could not get a die grinder or angle grinder into that tight space anyway. I tried heat. I tried special penetrating oil. About the best grip I could get on it was with an angled Crescent pliers. Alas, nothing could get it to loosen.

Eventually, I decided to try to cut off the nut and I bought a cheap rotary tool (dremel) at Harbor Freight. It came with 25 cutoff disks that were small enough (less than an inch) to get in that space. But being about the cheapest thing that HF sells, it was woefully slow at cutting through the steel nut. Hours and hours later, I was able to get 3 good cuts done and it finally loosened enough to break loose with the pliers, and then easily twist off by hand. Here is a picture of the nut itself once it came off.


All told, it took me over 11 and a half hours of really unhappy work, spread out over a month. In the process, I spent even more time and money trying to come up with work arounds. I also ruined the gasket between the valve body and separator plate, so there goes another $50 for that kit. Anyway, I think I will at least be able to start making progress again and doing things that are enjoyable.

Finally, fellow local Hurricane builder Paul Proefrock came over this week. He needed some pictures and measurements for another builder and since my car was still so open, it was easy to get it off of mine. I got a lot of other questions answered by him that will help me proceed.