Fly2High
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Sep 9, 2019
- Threads
- 74
- Messages
- 1,216
- Reaction score
- 633
- Location
- Long Island
- First Name
- Frank
- Vehicle(s)
- 2019 Mustang GT PP2
I hope you have kids, grandkids, nieces or nephews or at least a neighborhood kid to pass your knowledge and tools on to. Would be a terrible shame to lose it.Well, it goes like this:
I've always driven with a healthy dose of . . . well, let's call it 'sports-car enthusiasm' and leave it at that.
The Dodge was a hand-me-down car from my parents, who'd given me pretty much unlimited use of it while I was in school and dating. Its failure was a broken low-reverse band (a common failure for those transmissions), which cost me the use of reverse (the car remained fully drivable going forward). Apartment complex parking lot tranny swap. I even did a little suspension tuning on the Dodge and treated it to much better rubber than it came with originally.
I did one clutch job on the Pinto when I built up its 2.0L engine, mainly because everything was apart. And the other as part of a four to V6 powertrain swap. FWIW, the Pinto was a sport-sedan project car from the get-go.
The Malibu was another car with project intentions. Turned out, the OE Saginaw wasn't a strong enough transmission for the 350 I swapped in, and the T-10 that replaced it wasn't what I wanted when I went to a stouter build on a different 350 and wanted an overdrive gear (because of 3.73 gears). Along the way, my son managed to kill one of the 350s (dropped a valve and hydraulic'ed a couple of cylinders).
Near as I can figure, either the bellhousing or the rear face of the block on the 1987 Maxima wasn't drilled accurately enough. About every 50,000 miles the input shaft bearing would disassemble itself. Nissan did the first repair, but after getting past the shock of their pricing I did the next two - combined - for less money. Other than that it was a fun car to drive, and big enough for the family. Like the Pinto and the Chevy, we got about 175,000 miles out of it.
Sorry for the long off-topic, but to (try to) drag it back I never used more than a floor jack and jackstands for any of those jobs. I used to be able to bench-press the trannys back in, but those days are two decades and change in the past. I did get a real tranny jack for an eventual Magnum XL swap into the Mustang. That in itself might call for a little extra lift height, but I'll figure out a way to deal with it somehow if it does.
Norm
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