Enlarging holes

The task I've been attacking this past couple of weeks has been the big, landmark operation of putting the engine and box together and putting them both in the car. True to form, this has involved much more friggery than originally anticipated, and yet, paradoxically, it has also been a bit of a breeze. When you consider the extent of the changes I've made, and the lack of a plan anywhere in the proceedings, things are going remarkably well. It seems like there have been a lot of little obstacles, but apparently my problems solving ability has come a long way since I first started putting this car together, and every little problem seemed insurmountable.

The first thing that presented a bit of a problem was the insufficient clearance between the hydraulic throwout bearing I used on the gearbox and the fingers of the clutch diaphragm. There are shorter bearing cylinders available to alleviate this problem, but the instructions suggested another method, which was to move the box back from the bellhousing. In the end, I cut two 0.080 inch thick shims from an aluminium speed limit sign. With the additional 0.160 thickness the problem was licked.

It's important to note, for me at least, this would have been something of a showstopper had it happened a few years ago. I used to have a habit of mentally 'talking up' issues and blowing them out of proportion, allowing them to delay the whole project by months or years. I guess this is a reflection of my altered attitude nowadays towards this car. I used to do nothing when I didn't know what to do, out of fear that I would do something wrong. Now I'm focused and driven, and these little hurdles just get trampled by my drive to see this car on the road again.

Currently I'm working on two problems at once. Firstly, the engine and box seem to sit crooked in the car. This problem manifested years ago, when the 350 first went in, then with the automatic behind it, and it took a great deal of cursing and levering to push the transmission over to get the bolts in the mount. I'm not sure why this problem exists- I originally suspected the engine mounts, but the message board community seem to think I've got a bent frame. I don't know about that, the frame looks perfect, there's no ripples or creases or anything else to make me suspect it's been bent at some point. At any rate, the symptom is that with the engine mounts bolted in place, the transmission mount is about 3/4 inch to the right of where it should be. I've mostly resolved this now, by filing out the holes of one of the motor mounts to make them slightly oval.

The other half of the problem is the fitment of the transmission in the tunnel. It's a very different shape to the TH350, and it looks a lot bigger in the car than it did in the box. To date, the solution has been to cut out a rather large, transmission shaped hole from the floor. I plan to make a bolt-in cover for this, probably made out of the floor of the rusty '62 4-door hardtop parts car I bought about a week ago for the very reasonable sum of $200.

Looming on the horizion is the next issue of drivetrain alignment. This, too, I think I've got pretty much premptively solved, at least in theory, because with this I now know the goal. There's a lot of misinformation out there about driveshaft angles and how it's all supposed to work, and this is largely due to the fact that there's no catch-all rule on how it's done. I think I'm pretty well armed with knowlege now, after this morning's research into the subject.

I'm liking this newfound confidence in my own capabilities.