John S's Journal

Tuesday

The one job that I had hoped to accomplish after dinner was to get the gearbox crossmember installed. Everything was laid out and ready to go. This job is fiddly enough on a non-OD box but the OD unit seems to make the job a bit trickier. I don’t remember having this much fun in the past with the 4 synch non-OD gearbox. Anyways, after loosely bolting the mounts up with one bolt on each side (the ones closest to the OD unit), I offered up the crossmember so that the mount studs went through the front holes and was able to loosely thread a nut on both sides. This allowed me to then thread the remaining two mount bolts into the gearbox and snug them up a bit. All this was done with the gearbox resting on the fixed crossmember. Lastly, I jacked the gearbox up to line up the holes in the crossmember to the frame rails. Perfect. Until I noticed that the lower butterfly mount is 180 degrees out and the holes don’t line up to the crossmember. Damn. Now I have to undo things just to spin that lower butterfly mount around and have another go at it. Tomorrow. One of those jobs that make you wonder what the hell they were thinking when they engineered it…


Wednesday

Well, after a good nights rest, I once again crawled under the car fully prepared to take the whole crossmember off just so that I could rotate the lower butterfly 180 degrees so the holes would align with the crossmember. Pleasantly surprised that I could loosen up one side of the mount and then drop the rear bolt out of the other side and rotate the lower butterfly. This allowed me to easily bolt the mounts back up and snug everything up. Once jacked up into position, the crossmember lined up on the frame rails and the two bolts holding the butterfly mount went in. Done with that business.