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.
