7/22/06
A Little Help from My Friends

I set the date for Saturday to pull my transmission. I had four guys that could make it, so I had plenty of help. I got an early start and disconnected all the electrical connections to the overdrive and the speedometer cable drive. Help arrived right on time, and we had the transmission on the ground in little time. Looking back at the job, I am really glad I asked for help. It would have been a lot more stressful, and dangerous, to have tried this on my own.

The guys even helped me load it into my truck for its trip down to Francois! (Don’t worry Kerry, I wrote down the transmission numbers for you!)

With the transmission out, I found a few things I need to address. A rubber block separated from a transmission mount, so it should be repaired before reinstalling the transmission. I guess I call the usual suspects for Ferrari parts, unless someone has a better idea! Isn’t there a company that remanufactures motor mounts? I’m still without high speed internet at my house, so surfing the web has been painful using a dial up connection!

With all this manpower available to me, I asked for some more help with my Sunbeam. The transmission was taken out to un-seize a frozen clutch. I wanted to replace the old transmission with an overdrive transmission I found from another Sunbeam. Francois lent me his transmission jack to help with make this job easier, but having another set of hands and eyes would make things even easier. As we tried a few angles and techniques, we soon realized some of the floor pan was in the way of getting the overdrive transmission to fit. The old four speed transmission would have to go back in, but having everyone agree made me feel we gave it our best shot. By myself, I would have second guessed my final decision.

After getting everyone sufficiently dirty, I cooked up some burgers and we spent lunch taking about, you guessed it, cars. I want to thank Mike, Randy, Sean and Daryl for coming out to help. Your help was invaluable!

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