More Disassembly; Parts Get Their Own Table

Progress marched on, or rather baby-stepped a little further this weekend. After perusing the exhaust system and finding it modified beyond my ability to easily remove it (Thanks, Obama!), I decided I would probably just end up having to work with it in place, which I’ve read is possible. We’ll see.

But the transmission/transfer case situation is a bit closer to being able to be removed. On Saturday, I pulled the transmission pan, which is the only way to drain the fluid (I plan to change that as part of the rebuild). Whereas clean, healthy transmission fluid is a deep cherry red, the stuff that came out of the Eagle was… not. The color was somewhere between crude oil and squid ink. The sludge and debris that I found in the pan were roughly the color of interstellar space. 

The pan. It's so dark, it's reflective. The stuff that looks like little bubbles at the top and right is actually bits of debris.

The smell was what Ralph Wiggum would describe as “like burning”. Quoth the factory service manual: “If the fluid is badly discolored, smells burned, contains metal or friction material particles and transmission problems were experienced, the transmission may require an overhaul." So it's pretty official now.

This is the transmission with the pan off. That really dirty square-ish thing is the filter.

Another component that has to be removed, in order to remove the transmission, is the starter motor. Lemme tell ya something about starter motors: they don’t make ‘em like they used to. This is a good and bad thing. A bad thing, because the Eagle's starter motor is truly enormous, and weighs not less than 20 lbs. I guess it has to be, to handle the 800+ amps that the battery is rated at...

Here it is, covered in primordial ooze like everything else. For scale, my hand, from my wrist to the end of my middle finger, is about 7.5"

…a good thing, because once I got most of the mud off, the AMC tag and part of the serial number were visible, which means that this thing has been there since I was 8 months old, and still works great. Now it’s the newest addition to the newly christened Parts Table.

yep, the Parts Table