New Transmission  7                 Feb  2012

Feb. 1st.

Hot damn look what came in the very next day. I expected four boxes but looks like everything was packed in three....woohoo!! The box on top is my twin disc clutch upgrade and the middle box is my bellhousing upgrade to a steel scatter shield. And the bottom box has the transmission along with a few more parts and lots of hardware. Notice I put the trans on one of my dollies that I made years ago. They sure do come in handy for heavy stuff.
 

 

 

Here you can see a few bags of hardware along with a trans mount and in that white box is my hydraulic release bearing. On the left you can see a part of the shifter and they even threw in a hat!!
 

 

 

Now that's what I'm talk'n about, a nice new piece of hot rod hardware...it just doesn't get much better than that. The cardboard that it was packed in was really thick and I had a hard time cutting through it with a razor knife. On the other hand I'm glad they packed it well.
 

 

 

What you see below is the backing plate or engine plate which is .115 thick plate (almost 1/8") that came with the scatter shield (take a look and then read the rest). This plate goes between the engine block and scatter shield that should contain a clutch or clutch disc if it were to come apart (or some other related problem from this area) to protect the engine and whoever is riding in the car. And in case you were wondering, this picture is not out of sequence from the others. So how do you get this on with the flywheel installed? You don't!! And I remembered this at 1:00 in the morning and didn't get back to sleep thinking about it that night. Let me explain.

While I was opening the box with the transmission and looking at all the new parts, there was a packing slip that said to check and make sure the big box included what was on the list. I did all that and then worked my over to the McLeod clutch box. After that was the Quicktime scatter shield which was packaged pretty well. The black scatter shield was the first thing you saw when you opened the box and laying inside it were two small bags of hardware containing all the fasteners needed to install it. I looked at them for a moment and then placed them back in the box and closed it.

At one in the morning when I woke up, I seemed to be very awake for some reason but didn't know why. A few minutes later it hit me why there were two bags of hardware. If you look at the top portion of the picture below you will see six holes that are above the centerline of the plate. If you look close you can see threads behind that plate which are tapped holes in the engine block. Now towards the bottom half there are many more holes without threads. Those bottom holes attach the bottom portion of the scatter shield using bolts, washer and nuts. And then I remembered from the evening before, each bag of hardware that I looked at were different.

Right then I new what that second bag of hardware was for as it contained 'nuts' and the other one didn't. All I could do was shake my head back and forth knowing what I had done - I'd put the cart before the horse and that was the end of sleeping for that night. You see I never took the scatter shield out of the box and the plate that you see below was all wrapped up underneath it so I never saw it (as I shake my head back and forth again while I'm writing this).

A few minutes later my focus was on how am I going to get this flywheel off now? What I did was use some pry bars on each side of the flywheel along with some small pieces of aluminum behind them so I wouldn't damage the engine block. After a few minutes of some back and forth prying, it came right off. I had to use a little sand paper on the I.D. to clean off a burr or two but other than that it wasn't to bad.

It's been such a long time since I've had to deal with a car that had a scatter shield that I forget this was even part of the package. If only I had taken the scatter shield out of the box that night I wouldn't have had to do all this. Maybe next time I'll remember.
 

 

 

Paying attention to all the packaging was way up on the priority list now so first up was getting out the paperwork and reading it. One thing Quicktime wanted you to check was if the dowel pins were sticking out far enough from the engine block to locate the scatter shield properly and as you can see here they are not. At first glance you might say the pins are good-to-go but once I put on the backing plate the only thing left sticking out was the tapered portion of the dowel pins, and that's not good enough. What you need is a small straight section of pin to help locate the bellhousing (about 1/4" is fine) otherwise things won't line up correctly. If the bellhousing/scatter shield located on the tapered section of the pin then who knows were it would end up so this is why you need some kind of flat area to have it register on.

There are two fixes for this, one is buying new dowel pins that are longer and the other is to press the ones you have out a little farther - if they are long enough.

Also notice the purple wrap around my oil pressure line. Once the backing plate was in place, that line wasn't going to work in that position any longer and would have to be addressed. But I'll talk about the oil pressure line a little later as it gets added to the list of things to fix.
 

 

 

What you see here is a brass rod that I'm getting ready to hammer on which will drive the pin out farther. I measured the length of the pin first to make sure I would still have enough left inside the engine block and it looks like I can get away with moving them 1/4". Also notice that I had to remove the steering shaft bracket to get at the dowel pin. Once it was out of the way I had no problem swinging my hammer.

Once I was finished with the pins I noticed the steering shaft had a worn area under the rod end....hmmmm. I never felt anything wrong while driving the car because it turned really smooth. I put some wheel bearing grease on the shaft and bolted the bracket back in place. I guess this is something I'll have to keep an eye on.
 

 

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