Heavy Stuff

I was lazy and didn’t put away my engine lift. And once again, my laziness pays off! I’ve had to pull the engine out far more times than the zero times I planned on, so yay engine lift!

With the oil pan clearance issue solved forever by those shims (foreshadowing!), I decided it was time to turn my attention to the transmission. I got under to bolt the bellhousing up and there is nowhere near enough room between the engine and the car to get it positioned. At least, not with the clutch on. I could probably have removed the clutch, installed the bellhousing, then put the clutch back on through the transmission hole, but it seemed easier to lift the engine back out, bolt the housing on, then lower it back into place. Simple!

Nice! This was fifteen minutes of work. As I was taking this picture, I thought it looked a little high. Examining it more closely revealed that yes, it was a little high. It could be angled back a little, but my measurements all told me that this wasn’t going to work. Those shims only raised the engine 3/8″, but it seemed like it needed to come down more than that. I found if I kept the engine angle back, the pan would just barely clear, so I decided to take those shims out. Once again, I’m glad I didn’t put that engine lift away. This didn’t go as smoothly. The passenger side wouldn’t set down far enough for the bolt to go in and I fought that for the rest of that day.

When I got time to go work on her again, I found that I now had a LOT more room. Checking measurements on the transmission against the bottom of the car told me it would probably almost fit. Maybe. I have a slightly deeper oil pan that needs the engine to be raised, but the transmission is slightly bigger than stock and would like to have the engine lowered. It is like figuring out how to hold tea and no tea at the same time in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Infocom game. But maybe it will work. Since my measurements have been so bad up to now, I figure I should just test fit everything first and see where I’m at.

Attempting to improve my measuring techniques, I marked out where I had to cut for the shifter tower. Then I checked them all again. Then I realized I was measuring the wrong thing and did it all over.

I then drilled holes at each corner of the wrong square, marked that up top, got all of my extra welding protection stuff to protect the interior and barricaded everything underneath as well as I could. I didn’t want metal dust going into my new clutch and I especially didn’t want sparks flying back to my gas tank.

Then it was time to cut. I got the plasma cutter set up, thought about going in to put shoes on, decided that since I’d be kneeling I’d just kind of bunch up the end of my welding jacket over my knees and cut a big hole in my baby.

With this done, seeing if this hole was anywhere close became very important to me. I managed to get the transmission on the jack with little trouble. I ran out of ceiling space jacking the car up so the transmission would go in through the side, so I had to push it in from the rear. I need a taller shop so I can install a lift!

I had all the under-car transmission install alignment problems, but all in all, it went in far easier than I expected.

The top side even fit!

Around this point is when I realized I probably cut the wrong square shape, but then realized if I’d made the hole shorter from the front/back of the car, it wouldn’t have fit. But why did I make it so wide? Ah well, it isn’t what I intended, but it isn’t terrible. Once I clean up the edges, I can live with it.

So transmission done, right? Nope. This was just a test fit to see if things were going to fit at all or if I was going to end up cutting the whole tunnel out. Next chance I get, I’ll pull the transmission back out, hook up the hydraulic release bearing, get some primer on the places I scraped away paint for the plasma cutter and make sure I’m completely ready to bolt it all up for the last time. Now I just need to decide if it will be easier to remove the engine and transmission as one unit to do this work or if I do it all under the car again.

Oh, I did set the console back in the car and attached the shifter just to get an idea of what it would ultimately look like.

Perfect!