I did a little work at cleaning up the old transmission that I bought a couple of weeks ago. First I spent a good deal of timing using a wire wheel on my drill and air die grinder to clean off all of the grime on the transmission mount. It was pretty grimy, but after an hour or so it looked good and I even gave it a quick shot of paint to make it look nice. Then I decided to test fit it and I found that it won't work. DOH!!! The studs were too far apart to fit into the frame. I did some research and figured out that I needed a different mount, from an older Mustang rather than the F-150 truck it came out of. So a trip to Advance Auto Parts and $10 or so later I had a brand new one that fits perfectly. The one on the right in the following picture is the new one and you can see that the studs are about 1/4" closer than with the one I worked to get so clean. Oh well, it was good practice.
The next step was to clean the case. That came out reasonably well, but I did not figure it was worth spending too much time on that task given that the tranny may be just a short-term solution anyway. Grinding with a wire wheel and hand washing with a good degreaser seems to work okay, but I got covered with flying flecks of grime.
Good thing I wore goggles!
Next, I took off the tranny oil pan to expose its filter. I went back to Advance and spent another $10 on a new filter and gasket kit, which will go on tomorrow. Here is a pic of the tranny's innards.
