Sorry, nothing going on

I have not worked on the car since before Thanksgiving. Too busy and too cold.

Post Thanksgiving Post

I've been very busy with Thanksgiving of late. Cleaning, shopping, cooking, eating, dishwashing, etc. Too busy to get anything done on the car.

I did however run out and buy a new laptop computer with Windows 7. Naturally, that is causing a lot of difficulties. Any free time I have had has gone into trying to make work very old software, no longer supported. My digital camera was a problem, but I think I have it. Got all my old photos moved to the new machine.

Here is a new picture I took of the gaping hole that I ground out of the cockpit to allow the shifter linkage rod to pass freely and give me all of the gears in the AOD transmission.


This week will probably still be very busy, so I doubt that much will get done on the car. Sorry.

Major Breakthrough

My former boss, Lyn Pankoff, came over a couple of times this week and helped me work on the car. We were working on trying to get the cockpit to fit over the transmission shifter linkage, as I have been struggling with that for months. I decided to try again with the shifter moved back in the cockpit to where I like it better, not where the other guy who built a Hurricane with the AOD transmission that I am using put it.

I finally decided that to make it work, I was going to have to cut a relief in the fiberglass cockpit tub. No matter what I did, I just could not get the shifter to move through all six positions.

Together, we spent about 5 hours repeatedly putting the cockpit on and taking it off, measuring, whittling a little bit off, checking for rubbing, etc. The amount of fiberglass dust was amazing. But in the end, it is finally working beautifully. And best of all, I can now proceed on to some other items. Eventually, I will have to re-glass the tub, or put an aluminum cover over the hole, which will end up being covered with carpet anyway.

We also got a few other little things done, like tightening the transmission fluid fittings for lines that will run to the cooler and making sure they won't rub on anything. We also adjusted the third member on the rear axle to get it to have just a couple of degrees of droop from parallel, which is perfect. We also tweaked an aluminum fuel line which seemed to be a bit close to the cockpit tub and might have rubbed.

I am very happy and excited to be able to work on several other things next. I want to touch up my frame rustproofing and paint the steering tie-rods. I need to order and install the driveshaft. I need to put the tranny pan back on and fill it to test for leaks. I will probably want to get a driveshaft safety loop and install that. Then I should be good to final install the cockpit, the upper frame for the engine and start wiring. Too bad the holidays and winter are coming and it will be getting tougher to work on the car.

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.

Wedding

Sorry, I have nothing to post. I haven't really worked on the car in a couple of weeks. Phil and Helen have been in from California for their wedding. What a wonderful time it all was.

Stuck

Well, I am very stuck right now, thanks to a nut inside my transmission that simply won't budge.

Last week, Nathan and I testfit the cockpit and the shifter linkage workaround I came up with a while back did not work. It was more than an inch off. So I have decided that I do need to replace the selector arm, but I cannot get it loose.

Here are some pics we took along the way. You can see in the first one that the exhaust headers seem to be okay, clearing the cockpit footbox by an inch or so. In the second one, you can see a wider view of what the car will look like with the cockpit in place.




I think I am going to have to cut the nut off. It is probably okay, in that I don't have to re-use everything in there, but it is extremely tight where that frozen nut is. My regular cut-off wheel on my angle grinder is too big so I may pick up a cheap dremel type rotary tool to cut the nut. The really depressing thing is that even when I do get the new arm in place, the shifter linkage may still be too close to the tub that it will require more re-work. Ugggh!

Back to work

I spent a few minutes today putting on my headers and their gaskets. I had painted them a few months ago, but they would have been in the way if I had attached them, up until now. Since I want to test fit the cockpit very soon, I wanted them in place. The clearance from the cockpit footbox to the headers can be very small, in some cases less than an inch.

Anyway, it was pretty easy. I had already bought some cheap header bolts that are the correct size, but unpopular with other builders because they tend to loosen too easily. We shall see. I do see that they are a huge pain in the neck to try to tighten once everything is in place. Here is a good picture showing the header in place with the spark wire in place.



You can see one bolt to the right of the plug in place and one hole to the left of the plug with no bolt. It is extremely tight in there and getting a socket may be terribly difficult, especially once the cockpit footbox is in the way.

In the end, I spent about a half an hour on this task, and another hour scouring the internet to double check that they were not upside down. They fit pretty nicely either way, and I would not have been the first builder to make that mistake. It turns out they are fine. Here is a finished picture that has been modified to show up a little better on the computer.



And big thanks to Gil Kleine who came by my house tonight and helped me move the cockpit out to the garage. The Passat is now sleeping outside, so pray for no hail.

No work

I did nothing on the Cobra this past week. Instead, I will post a neat story/video of an FFR getting built by/for a guy with ALS.

Shifter

I worked a lot on the shifter this week. I picked up a spare rod to try bending to fit better, but that did not work. Eventually, I ended up connecting a straight rod to a new replacement bolt that was longer than the original. This allowed me to move the rod closer to the transmission itself and hopefully clear the fiberglass cockpit tub. I do not know yet if that did the trick as I need another set of hands to test that fit.

Here is a good picture of the shifter mounted on the transmission where you can clearly see the steel rod connecting it to the transmission arm.


And here is another from the driver side showing the shifter itself.


Finally, here is a closeup of my modification to bring the connecting rod more into the location that it would have been in had I been able to use the replacement shifter selector arm from last week. Like the extra nuts being used as spacers?


It does shift, but it is a little stiff. Not exactly sure what to do about that. It is still all just mocked up and will definitely have to be loctited if I decide it is good to go.

I also picked up a tap and die set this week at Harbor Freight. This was part of my messing around with the shifter linkage work, but I also want to use that to make nice threaded holes for bolts that will be for the electrical grounds. I may finish the battery cables and terminate them to grounds this coming week.

Pictureless progress

I did start work on the shifter. It went smoothly enough, though one hole on the mounting plate seems to have been stripped out of the box. I suppose I could have done it, but I really don't think so. I got the mounting plate on, and I had it located farther to the rear of the car than the one other guy who has used this AOD transmission before. I thought it would look better with the shifter farther back in the cockpit.

It turns out that included in the shifter kit is a new replacement for the transmission selector arm. I decided to try to replace it as the instructions indicated but I could not loosen the old nut holding it on. I had tightened this nut before when I had to flip the selector arm to be pointing up a few weeks ago, and I guess it got too tight. Anyway, there just seems to be no way that the offending nut will ever get loosened. I tried every tool possible to no avail. Penetrating oil did not work. I thought about using heat, but ended up deciding to modify the existing arm to connect to the new shifter linkage. I used my cutoff wheel to remove part of the old arm but left the main part and bushing I needed to work with the new stuff I had. The good news is that it seems to work. The bad news is that when Nathan and I tried to testfit the cockpit, it was going to be in the way of the fiberglass tub. So I will have to re-engineer something else.

Passat fixed?

I think the dealer finally has my Passat fixed. They had it basically all week. Keep your fingers crossed.

On the Cobra, I did manage to get the fuel pump back on. It was really difficult. It turns out that I had put on the gasket last time. Oh well, I had another anyway. I eventually got it on using the air wrench rather than a special nut driver. I will eventually need to monitor it carefully to see that no oil leaks around it. I also rerouted and shortened the rubber fuel line going into the pump as I tightened the connectors just a bit more. Here is a picture of that whole area finished off.

You can see the very small oil pressure line coming out from the engine block between the fuel pump and oil filter. The two shiny hoses are the braided stainless steel power steering lines going up to their pump.

I did not start working on my shifter yet. My back was a little sore for some inexplicable reason this week, so I did not want to do a bunch of work on that since it will entail lying on my back. This coming week, I will, though. Oh, and I did re-install the spark plugs I took off some time ago. I don't think I will need to spin the crankshaft over any more, so back on they went.

Not very motivated right now

Sorry to say, but I haven't done much on the Cobra of late. The Passat is STILL giving me troubles. I did receive the oil pressure line. I spent about 10 minutes putting its pieces together and is shown in this picture.


Today, I installed it onto the engine block. Here is a poor pic showing the port hole for the line, located between the oil filter and the fuel pump.

Unfortunately, there was almost no way to get any tools on this line, so I ended up taking off both the filter and the pump. No problem on the filter, but the pump is a bear to get back on. I knew I needed to do so, because I had not put on the gasket originally. Right now, the project that I was hoping would take no more than 10 minutes has gone on about an hour and a half, with no completion in sight. It is just very hard to get that fuel pump back in place with the fuel and power steering lines in place. I really need a third hand or at least a 9/16" nut driver, which is actually quite rare.

I also took some pictures of the shifter kit parts. Here they are...

Car work confined to my Passat

The only car work I got done this week was the continuing work on my Passat. It needed its 80K maintenance last week, which went fine except for a great coupon book I had in the back seat that turned up missing. Within a week, I had lost a hubcap, and had the check engine light come on again. The dealership was pretty nice about everything. They comped the hubcap which turned out to be a set of 4 new ones, since they could not match the missing one. They also offered to cover the labor on the second service for the check engine light with me paying for the part.

The only thing Cobra-related this week was that my back-ordered transmission shifter arrived. It looks really great. And I like the Lokar instructions for a change. The only possible problems I see is that the tunnel may not be quite big enough for the linkage, and the shifter itself sits pretty far forward, most likely farther than the existing cutout in the tunnel currently sits.

Checking off another couple of items

This past week, I got another couple of small things done, but mostly did research.

First, I installed the dipstick for the transmission. When I bought the used transmission, the guy included several things that I might want to re-use, and the fill-tube and dipstick were included. It looks pretty crappy, but new ones are fairly expensive, so I thought we'd give this one a shot.

Not much to the install. One end sort of clicked into the tranny housing, and the bracket to mount it to the bellhousing bolt was where it needed to be, just at the wrong angle. Nothing a little beating with a BFH (big hammer) wouldn't fix. A little silicone around the bottom of the tube and now it seems good to go. Since it was originally in a pickup truck, it looks a little funny because it is so long, but it seems to fit well enough. Here are a few pics...






The next task was to install the speedometer cable. This I did buy new from Lokar. I did get the little gear that was on the old speedo cable inside the transmission, so I hope it will be okay for my setup. It was a light gray one, but there are several others that may be used depending on things like tire size, and differential gear ratios. Worst case, the speedometer will be off a bit or I will have to buy one later for $10 or so to get the right one.

Here is a good pic of the parts...

On the right is the new cable, and on the left is the old cable end, the old gray driven gear and a little retainer clip that holds the gear on the end of the cable. Surprisingly, the new cable did not come with an O-ring, so I used one I had left over from a previous toilet repair kit. Seemed to be the same size.

That end gets inserted into a hole in the rear of the transmission and the driven gear mates with a gear on the output shaft inside the tranny. I re-used a small bolt to hold it in place.

Inside the cable housing there is an inner cable that actually does all the work. This needed to be lubricated with some gooey yellow stuff. I pulled the cable out and lubed it up, but was not very careful and just let the cable droop down to the ground as I went along. It ended up picking up all kinds of dirt from the ground underneath the car where I was working. I am sure it did more harm than good. So I had to clean off the worst of it reapply more lube. I suppose it is fine--it seems to turn okay. I have heard that some of the Lokar cables have a tendency to bind and break, so we will just have to see. It was only a $17 part, so I am not awfully worried. Here is a pic with it finished, in place, but coiled up until I am ready to put in the cockpit and dash. The end that goes into the gauge is visible near the bright green duct tape.

Water neck

Today, I installed the thermostat and its housing also called the water neck. I also test-fit a couple of hoses that I bought for the cooling system. Here is a picture of that stuff.


The thermostat is a special one, about 3 times as expensive as normal ones, that has a special feature that if it fails, it fails in the open position, so coolant will still circulate even if it breaks. It went in easy enough and the housing around it seems okay too. A lot of people report that this type of chromed one has a tendancy to leak. I won't know for a while, but nice aluminum necks can run $50 to $120, so I am keeping my fingers crossed for this $12 one. Here is a picture of it installed on the intake.


The hoses have to wait for a later time. The small L-shaped hose above is called the bypass hose and needs to be cut down pretty drastically at both ends, if I am going to use it. What that does is ensure that coolant gets to the engine immediately at startup, regardless of the engine temperature. Not that big of a deal actually. To use it, I will have to also buy a special fitting to get it to connect to the water pump. Right now, it is just plugged.

The other, larger hose in the picture above is the upper radiator hose. This is how hot coolant leaves the engine and goes to the radiator to be cooled back down. Naturally, I could not test its fit until I start to work on the radiator. That is still a few weeks away. I want to have it roughly in place now, though, so I can finish off the running of the fuel line from the fuel pump to the carburetor that I started a few weeks ago.

I also spent a great deal of time today trying to test fit the ignition coil on the front of the engine. Not to my surprise, I could not make it work. It is just too crowded up there where many people put it because I have all the power steering stuff already in that spot. Instead, I will end up mounting it on the inside of the passenger side fender, the other common spot use by many builders.

Differential complete

I finished getting the gear oil in the differential today and have some decent pictures to go with the story.

The first problem was figuring out how to remove the drain plug. Unlike every other plug I have seen, this one did not have a hexagonal hole in the head; its was square. Here is a picture.

It turns out that instead of using an Allen wrench, you have to use a 3/8" ratchet wrench without any socket on it.

So the next problem is how to get the oil out of the bottle and into the third member. The big problem is that the hole is on the side, perpendicular to the ground, so the oil has to go in sideways.

Having run all of my brake and fuel lines precluded me from getting the nipple of the bottle into the right position. And I did not want to undo any of the other work I had done, just to make room. Here, the internet did not have a solution.

I ended up taking some leftover aluminum tubing from my fuel line and cutting off a piece to form a fill tube.


Here is a picture with the tube going into the fill hole and the top of the fill tube visible, but a little blurry.


That tube is only 3/8" wide, so filling this way was very slow. The first quart, squeezed in by hand, took about 45 minutes. Today, I put the second quart in and punched a hole in the bottom of the bottle, so it would drain out fast and that let me finish in about 10 or 15 minutes.

I also had to add a 4 oz bottle of friction modifier. That is required for non-synthetic oil used in this limited slip differential. It prevents annoying chattering. I just mixed it into the bottle of oil and fed it in with the rest. Here is a picture of that. It is only noteworthy because it is the nastiest, evilest smelling thing I have ever encountered.

Getting into the Zone

Auto Zone. More on that in a bit.

Today, I bought a bunch of things that I studied about last week. From Summit Racing, I bought:

My transmission shifter (backordered for 3 weeks)


my transmission oil cooler


and my oil pressure gauge line (backordered for a month)


The backorder status is unfortunate, but I have plenty to do and these prices were very good.

I also decided to buy a bunch of things from AutoZone. Normally, I prefer buying from Advance Auto Parts, because they support the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. But AZ has a cool deal where if you are a frequent customer who makes at least 5 purchases of $20 or more within 6 months, you get a $20 credit. So they will be getting some of my business now too.

Today, I got my water neck (where the coolant exits the engine on the way to the radiator), a rubber bypass hose (needed to make sure the engine has fluid in it at startup), and a quart of rear end gear oil. These cost me $22, wink-wink. Tomorrow I will be going back to buy an upper radiator hose, a thermostat, and another quart of gear oil that will also cost $22. Later, there will be plenty of more little things to buy like the lower radiator hose, motor oil, transmission fluid, a battery, etc., all of which will get done in as close to $20 increments as possible.
Every little bit will help.

I even got to work on the car then for a couple of hours too. You wouldn't think it would take that long to add 1 quart of gear oil to the differential, but it did. I probably should have done it a year ago when I put that together, but it did not need the lubrication since it wasn't going to be moving anyway. Now, since I am getting closer to putting the cockpit tub in place, it would be harder to access that if I waited any longer. I took some pics, but they aren't very clear so I won't post them til I finish the job tomorrow, if at all.

Pictureless progress

All things considered, this was a decent week, but there were no good photo opportunities. I was able to figure out what was wrong with my kickdown cabling from the last post. It turns out I was trying to use the existing nut rather than the special new one that came with a spacer attached. Swapping that out made everything work very well. It is still in mock up mode though, for now.

I spent a great deal of time this week on the computer, researching more stuff I am going to need to do and to buy. I have figured out what I need to do for the gauges to work, and what I want to get for the water outlet and thermostat. I also still need to buy the shifter and driveshaft. I was able to take the measurements that I need in order to supply the people who will eventually make the shaft. I did have a slight problem with one measurement, since I did not know what a U-joint cap diameter was. I posted a question on the Hurricane owner forum and got the answers I needed within a day, so I should be able to get one made now. Hopefully, this week.

A very little progress

I did not get a whole lot accomplished in the past week. I did get the starter motor bolted up. Here is a picture of that (not yet wired up)...


Next I moved on to the TV cable, also known as the kickdown cable. Basically, it is a cable that runs from the carburetor to the transmission that lets the tranny know what is going on with the throttle. The one that came with the transmission was old and gnarly, so I bought a nice new shiny one made by Lokar, at top quality company. Here is the kit...


I started to install it, and I am not pleased with how it all fits. There are several things I do not like and I am contemplating actually going back to the old one. Here are some pics of the new one in place, but barely.



I still need to order my shifter and my driveshaft, but until I satisfy myself on the workings of this kickdown cable, progress will be limited.

Del and I double-teamed a tranny

Get your minds out of the gutter!

This week, my friend Del came over one day after golf and we managed to get the transmission installed. All of the studs and nuts matched up well after the grinding work I did the week before. So now it is in, and I hope I don't have to ever pull it again. Here are a few pictures of it in place.

In this one, you see it mated to the engine. I left the chains that we used to lift it into place connected to the transmission.


This shows the tail of the tranny where I will still need to acquire a very short driveshaft. It will be about a foot long and connect the tranny to the 3rd member; the gears that drive the rear axles.


In this pic, you can see the hole where the starter bolts up to the transmission. That 3 or 4 inch hole is what we had to access the flexplate holes and torque converter studs to get them to match up.


Finally, here is a picture of my new (refurbished, actually) high torque mini-starter. I will bolt that in place this week.


Oh, and earlier in the week, I installed a mounting bracket on the carburetor which holds the throttle cable in place and provides the spring to return the throttle to idle when you lift your foot off of the gas pedal. It also works as a base for another cable which links the carb to the transmission, so it knows when power is being applied that requires an automatic shift in gears. Once I get that linkage in place, I will take a picture. Hopefully this coming week.

Problem identified

I have determined that the cause of my torque converter binding on the flexplate was the fact that there was a drain plug on the TC that was hitting the plate. You can see it here, about an inch and third from one of the 4 studs that connect the TC to the plate...


It seemed like it was tight but I bought a metric socket just a little smaller than the normal one I had been using to try to tighten it and was able to get it to go in a little further. Still not quite far enough, so I ended up ever so slightly opening up an already existing hole on the flexplate where the drain plug was hitting, and also grinding down just a bit of the head of the plug. I think that has it solved. I hope to mate the tranny again to the engine in the next couple of days.

Feeling better about the overall situation, I also installed the throttle cable bracket and return springs. This cable, once installed, basically reduces power when you take your foot off the gas and also gives input to the transmission through a kickdown cable so it knows what gear to select. Pics of that later.

Resuming work

I resumed working on the car today. I managed to pull the transmission out (single-handedly). I still need to check the union between the torque converter and the flexplate, but it looked okay. Which is to say, I have no idea why I could not get the two pieces to hook up well enough to tighten properly.

The thread locker that I put on the flexplate bolts seems to be working great this time. Too bad, though, because I actually was going to remove the flexplate to check how it fits with the torque converter. I still can, but it is going to take more muscle power than I am willing to expend right now. Maybe tomorrow.

Somewhat defeated

I've been feeling very defeated lately on my problems with the torque converter, so I have taken about 10 days off from building. I should be back at it this week.

Mating season

As promised last post, here are some pics of the tranny oil pan drain plug that I installed. In order, they are the plug components, the pan with a hole drilled, and the finished pan.




This past weekend, my nephew Nathan and I spent about 7 hours getting the transmission mated to the engine and in place. It was grueling, dirty work which I could not possibly done on my own. I owe Nathan a great deal for his help.

We ran into many problems along the way. The torque converter was quite heavy and was accidentally dropped by me causing my first real fluid spill. Getting the transmission perfectly in place to mate with the engine was very difficult without a special transmission jack. We just used the engine lift to get it roughly into place.


Then we just manhandled it so that the dowel pins on the engine lined up with the tranny case. It is not nearly as easy as it sounds. The tranny did not line up well, and even when it was connected to the engine, it did not fit right in the frame. We ended up having to loosen everything up, manhandle the engine as well, to get everything to be where it needed to be. Then we tightened the case to the block.

Big mistake! We did not have the holes of the flexplate lined up with the studs on the torque converter, so when we tightened everything, it did not line up right. We only learned of this when we tried to turn the crankshaft by hand and nothing would budge. So we had to undo everything, several hours in, and start over. This time we verified that the plate and torque converter holes were matching before we started putting things back together. Fortunately, it seemed okay, so we proceeded to put it all back together again, only to find out that once everything was where it belonged, the studs on the torque converter did not go through quite far enough through the holes on the flexplate to be able to install the nuts needed to hold the two pieces together. Eventually, we got 3 out of 4 to snug up a bit, but the fourth seems almost impossible to make work, and I am not sure that the first 3 have engaged enough threads to hold long-term. I am not sure how to proceed from here.