Славься, Отечество наше свободное!

Last time, we saw what the transmission looked like before it went back under the car. Once I got it under the car, it would sit there for a week until I got a large enough chunk of time to pursue the task of raising it up and bolting it in.

I got it raised up easily enough and almost had the first bolt-hole aligned when I realized that I had done a Dumb Thing. What was it, you ask? When I temporarily took out the torque converter to lighten the load, I put it in the car on the back seat. And there it still sat. On the back seat. Not in the transmission. Many self-disgust. Much facepalm.

Belongs in here:

It's the big blue thing

Not in here:

Tha back seat

I lowered the transmission which then proceeded to get hung up on the flywheel or the front exhaust pipe or something and thereby overtax the new bolt in the jack adapter. Long story short, the transmission had to come off the jack again, and the jack adapter had to be fixed again. I will make an encompassing gesture with my arms and say that MANY THINGS HAPPENED, and that about an hour later I had the torque converter installed, and the transmission back on the jack, under the car, and ready for installation.

Aligning the bolt holes and getting the bolts in was actually easier than it was to undo them a few months ago. This was partially helped by everything under the car being quite a bit cleaner than before, and the rest was probably just the universe giving me a break after a rough start to the morning.

Either way… the transmission is back in! In the spirit of the Olympics, it sort of feels like a national anthem should be playing for that announcement. For some reason, the tune of the Russian anthem conveys, for me, the proper amount of pageantry for the occasion. Anyway. Picture:

transmission, where an empty space used to be

Now I’m in the middle of reconnecting the many things that were connected to the transmission before. The gearshift and throttle linkages, wires for the neutral start switch, the engine’s flywheel, the starter, the adapter housing, the dipstick tube, the exhaust air tube, the cooling lines, and on and on. I connected a few of those things already, including the adapter housing, but I’ll have to take that one off again because I’m pretty sure it’s on wrong. But the biggest hurdle of the whole project just might be over. That assumes that I fixed the transmission correctly, of course, but it could hardly be in worse shape than it was.