Aye, well good news and bad. As could be anticipated with a car with 220,000 miles, things did not come apart easily. It took most of Saturday just to remove the obstructions and the sub frame. Late in the evening, we decided to hold off until Sunday to attempt the trans drop. Sadly, that didn't go well either. The shift linkage didn't want to split, the trans didn't want to split from the engine, it was a disaster. Halfway through the day, we had the trans out and had the new clutch in place.
The old clutch was a total disaster. The pressure plate looked OK from the outside but once I pulled it off, things started to look different. The pressure plate was gouged by the friction disc rivets, the friction disc was frayed at the outer edges and the whole disc was brittle. The take-up springs on the disc were totally knackered. The edges had been rubbing the inner edge of the pressure plate, one had been visibly overheated and was collapsed. All four were hanging loose in their brackets and rattling. The release bearing sounded like it had been filled with sand and spun at 20,000 RPM. I was in grave danger of a catastrophic failure in a very short amount of time. Thankfully the flywheel was still in good nick and required very minor surface repair.
The slave cylinder was a wreck as well. It hadn't leaked but either due to heat from the thrashed bearing or the shagged disc, the boot was torn, brittle and collapsed. The screws affixing it to the trans housing were completely seized and in trying to remove them with a torx driver, they immediately stripped. The only way to get them out was to drill them hollow, cold chisel the heads off and twist out the remains. One broke off in the housing and had to be totally drilled out and the hole re-tapped to 7mm.
Following the slave replacement that neared a partial rebuild of the trans, we had little time left to lift the trans back into the car. The disaster continued. My trolley jack turned out to be leaking so we were left with one trolley jack and a bottle jack. While it provided plenty of lift, it provided nothing in the way of mobility. Try as we might, all we succeeded in was having the trans drop off one jack or the other three times. Finally, I decided to attempt the use of a ratchet strap around the beam supporting the engine. Things were working great until the ratchet strap decided it couldn't life any more. We employed the services of the bottle jack to provide additional lift to the strap. The trans was nearly in place. I crawled under the car to attempt to wrestle the intermediate shaft onto its splines and my Pop maneuvered the trans. Everything was going great and we were SO close to having both shafts stabbed in when suddenly the bottle jack let go. Thankfully we've both worked on drilling rigs and know that you always stay out from under large pieces of shabbily supported metal and I was clear of the trans as it dropped about 10 inches onto the trolley jack. At this point, we gave up for the evening.
Tomorrow begins a new day and a new attempt. I'm going to try the nylon ratchet strap around the trans again but use a ratcheting winch to lift the trans by the strap. I wish I could justify an engine lift or afford a good trans jack, but I think this will work. We were so close with just the ratchet strap and if we'd had more lift, we'd have been golden.
In any case, it's been taxing but I'm still glad I decided to do it myself. Despite having MS which makes such work extra challenging, In the end the satisfaction will be worth every moment and all the pain.
