A slight diversion into the transmission

The general blog's been quiet lately, while my Pelican transmission rebuild thread has been in heavy rotation. As I hinted in my last post, I started thinking the transmission was going to need a little more attention than just a fluid change. Well, to make a long story short, the transmission box ended up needing major work, with extremely (even unusually) worn gears & synchros, broken bearings, incorrectly torqued fasteners... the list of wrongs is long. I ended up having to take it completely apart and replace quite a bit.

It ended up being a classic case of the five stages of auto restoration: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Oh, wait, those are the five stages of dying! Well, it's not that different. Once confronted with the truth, there was no way that I was going to be able to put a junk transmission back into this wonderful car. We'll be glad to have it in good shape, I have no doubt. But it was hard to accept the delay, not to mention the added expenses.

This was Katie's reaction when I told her that we had a lot of work still to do (note the elevated digit):

And this is how the transmission looked at maximum disassembly.

It has since started coming back together. We're still waiting on a few more key parts (like 4th gear!) But it should mostly be done by the end of the long weekend. Here's a reassembled synchro mechanism. See the Pelican thread if you want to know more about this. It's been fascinating coming to understand how all this actually functions.

The delays in waiting for parts have let me take care of a few other important things. Probably the most valuable was making the brakes functional. This was 'merely' a matter of adding fluid, then bleeding out all the air. Not as easy as it sounds. But all four calipers (rebuilt by us, if you recall) do function. That'll be nice on that first drive.

I've also been planning how to get the 500 lb. engine off the engine stand. Katie's been working out, but she's not quite up to hoisting this thing single-handed yet. I wanted some way to do this that didn't result in broken backs or broken engines, and I think I've come up with it. I made a dolly from a braced pallet, and think we can use jackstands to first get it off the stand, and then drop it down in a few stages to the floor. Here's my mock-up:

Finally (for now), I've also acquired the sound deadening and padding for the interior, which means that we can install the carpet whenever we find the time. That'll make the car look nicely finished. The bare floor still clashes with the good looking exterior. Maybe we'll get started on this over the weekend too. We'll see.