With a brand new driveway to leak...errr...work on, I laid down plywood to prevent a mess and the destruction of some fine new tarmac. Instead of using a floor jack to set the car on the stands, I employed Brutus the wrecker. It was big time fun and a neighborhood spectacle...like usual.

When I got under there and unbolted the flexplate inspection cover, I was greeted by this massive chunk of bellhousing smashing me in the face. My movie star looks were not harmed by the jagged shard of aluminum.

The backside of the bell housing chunk. My incorrect assumption to the extent of the damage on the other side of the trans led to the next unintentional moments of hilarity.

The real fun began when I decided to drain the fluid (or as much as possible) out of the old transmission to minimize the disastrous mess that was probably coming. I got a good load of fluid out of it in an orderly fashion and then went after getting the bolts out of the side of the bell housing which appeared to be intact. I was wrong about that part. I removed those bolts along with some small pieces of aluminum, put my small floor jack under the transmission and then took the nut off of the stud on the trans mount. Next, I made the infinitely stupid decision of wiggling the back of the transmission. Since the other part of the bell housing was broken into pieces, there was nothing to hold it up and the trans literally fell out of the car, landing into the drain pan of trans fluid creating an Exxon Valdez situation in my driveway.

I have no photos of that mess because I was in full on panic mode trying to contain as much of it as possible while at the same time loudly wondering how I had escaped grade school with my current level of smarts. I got the mess mostly contained in my hair, shirt, shorts, and whatever dirt I threw on the ever growing puddle. This view of the transmission pretty much sums up how screwed it was.

Not much left there to work with. Once I got this piece out, the car sat on the jacks for a couple days over the holiday weekend. The cavalry was coming, though.

Monday dawned with my BangShifty pal Tony coming up to help. He announced his presence at 7:30 with a full bore Bonneville-style pull up the 1.5 miles of my dead-on straightaway of a street. As I stated before, my neighbors are not my biggest fans. I had gotten all of the tools ready to go, carried the transmission up from the basement and gotten the new torque converter ready to be filled. He took over the job of filling the converter and we slapped it on the front of the TH350 rotating it to get it seated as deeply as it should be.

With the converter in the trans and the arrival of another BangShifty pal, Jon Wall, we set about bolting the slushbox into the cart. Tony was on jack man duty as Jon and I guided it home onto the dowel pins. Tony was also pressed into photographic mode to document the fact that I was actually participating in this extravaganza of grime. With three dudes, it was smooth sailing until we realized that the converter wasn't fully seated and it all had to come back down again. That wasn't all that bad, I guess.

That's Tony...he's not a doctor, he is an escaped mental patient. I believe that he is asking which way the beer cooler is in this photo...and yes, there was a beer cooler.

We had a couple more sets of hands helping us along, too. These guys were pretty critical of everything that was going on.

Then a funny thing happened. A car show broke out in my driveway! You'll be seeing more of each of these in the coming weeks on BS. Here's Wayne's killer Buick with Stage 1 455 power.

Tony had his always awesome 1956 Chevy there.

Scott and Chris came by in the completed AMX/GTO (this photo is not from my driveway obviously)

Mike also swung by in his Procharged 1957 Chevy. 383 SBC and a stick box! It rules!

With the party in full swing, we went back to work. Snaking the dipstick down proved to be a pain in the ass, but Tony and Jon got it squared away. We had a little leakage from the transmission cooler lines which was corrected by swapping some fittings off of the 700R4, and the only other real hiccup was the need for a new kickdown cable, which I scored for 20 bucks off the shelf at the local soulless giant auto parts chain store.

Once the dip stick was installed and the cross member was bolted back in, we were done for the day as I had not found a driveshaft for the car yet. We got a thumbs up from the two inspectors on the job site.

While hunting for a driveshaft, I knew that I would have to plumb in the vacuum modulator from the TH350 because the 700R4 that lived in the car did not have one. After a quick tech consult with the dudes on the BS forums, I decided to use the vacuum line on the back of the intake manifold.

$2.99 or so got me an array of vacuum T fittings from the parts store and it was snip snip time.

A quick job of placing the T in the line and running the rubber hose to the back of the trans squared away the modulator issue once and for all.

Easy as pie.

While the hunt continued for a driveshaft, I decided to address the exhaust pipe that was mangled in the dyno mishap. I surveyed my options and went for the old standby of brute force and heat.

With a torch on the area that looked bent the worst and my jack applying pressure to the pipe, I was able to get it a lot closer to the floor than it was, but it isn't ideal. This motor probably won't live another two months anyway, so it is staying in the "not ideal" mode for a while. (This was a pre-bend photo)

The driveshaft proved to be the trickiest part of this whole thing and I have to seriously thank Jesse Treveloni (he of infamous Secret Weapon wagon fame!) at Linder's salvage yard in Worcester, MA for keeping on the case and finding me this gently used Caprice 9C1 shaft for a great price. I jammed some U-joints into it and the car is now back on the streets, burning rubber and smoking a lot more than it once did.

I whispered at this thing that we would be hitting the dyno again...this time with nitrous...and it peed a little.