Transmission In

Last Saturday I finally got my new transmission installed in the Cutlass. Doing a project on a car is not unlike an IT project. You have management (Anke) asking for a timeline of when said project will be done. And you really have no idea so you make up a number, multiply it by 1.5 and say that is how long it will take. And it still takes longer. This should have been a 4 - 6 hour job if everything had fallen into place. We started around 9:30am Saturday and I left for home around 1:30am Sunday.

The guys who worked on my car were really great guys. And they knew what they were doing. They had to do some custom fabrication for a couple of mounting brackets. The bracket for the kick down cable will be redone, because we aren't really happy with it but at one in the morning you're willing to say we can live with this for now. I also didn't get my Hurst rachet shifter installed. This is the last time I order car parts from Ebay. It was missing a couple of small, yet key, parts that I didn't know were missing until we started taking apart the interior of my car to install the new shifter. So I'll be ordering a new shifter from Summit Racing. Paying full price, but knowing exactly what I'll get.

A happy note is that my old transmission will still have a life post Scotty's Cutlass. Chris- who did most of the work on my car- has a 1968 Pontiac LeMans that only has an old two speed turbo-glide transmission. Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Buick all have the same engine/transmission bolt pattern so Chris will be able to bolt my old Turbo-350 transmission right up to his Pontiac motor, giving him three gears now instead of two.

A project that I found infinitely cool that the other Chris (whose shop we used) is in the process of putting a small block 383 Chevy engine into an 89 (I think) BMW 3-series.