Oh! That’s what happened!

Well I got her up in the air this weekend and started taking out the transmission and looking for the culprit.

 

 

It was a bit of a PITA to get out and that’s with gravity helping and trying to drop it on my head. I can’t even begin to imagine putting it back in, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

To get the transmission out I had to first drain it, remove the shift handle, the drive shaft and the safety loop. Then I slid the floor jack underneath it and strapped it to the jack with a ratchet strap. (My heads hard but not hard enough to support that thing)  With the jack supporting it I removed the rear tranny mount and the A-brace. Next were the 4 bolts that hold it to the bell-housing and I started to back it out. Problem was the shifter hit the tranny cover, so up to the top of the car and remove the tunnel cover, next thing I know the shifter is running into a brace, so off comes the shifter. In retrospect this is a good thing because I found a leak under the shifter so I can fix that later. Once that was out I was able to back it up enough for the input shaft to clear the bell-housing. I then tipped it forward and lowered it down. I was also surprised by the number of bolts I had in a pile when I was all done getting it out, silly considering I put them all in but not all at the same time.

The hole in the top center of the transmission is where the shifter goes and that’s where the leak was. Fortunately there’s no damage to the tranny from this little incident.

With the tranny out I could see what I was starting to suspect and that was the fork had come off the pivot bolt. Only problem was I couldn’t find the pivot bolt. So next thing to come out was the bell-housing. Below you can see into the bell-housing, still mounted, in the center of the pic and you can see the end of the fork that should be clipped onto the pivot bolt….if it were there.

With the tranny out of the way I then removed the bell-housing and found the problem and the bolt. It was laying in the bottom of the bell-housing. You should notice a few things in the pic below. The pivot bolt on the right is supposed to be in the hole in the center of the pic. The end of the fork coming up from the bottom of the pic isn’t supposed to be worn like that and didn’t have that nice shade of brown and blue when I put it in. Looks like something was rubbing and getting a bit warm. You can’t see it all that well in this pic but the bolt made a few trips around the inside of the bell-housing before I got the car stopped. Not sure it would have mattered since we weren’t moving all that fast and the engine was just above idling when this happened but part of the reason I put in an SFI rated bell-housing to keep things like this contained. If we had been blazing down the freeway when the bolt let go it could have been flying around with a bit more enthusiasm. 

This is the pressure plate and you can see where the fork was rubbing on it just outside the fingers that point towards the center. Overall this piece is fine and those are only scratches, the fork took all of the damage.

Here you can see a bit more of the damage to the fork, from rubbing, and pivot bolt from making a few trips around the inside of the bell-housing.

Here’s a close up of the bolt.

Oh, earlier I mentioned I found the culprit, if you thought it was the bolt, you’re wrong. Here it is.

Parts are on order. Let’s see if I can get it right the second time so I can get this thing off to paint and bodywork. Stay tuned.