ToxicDoc - Thx for the heads up on the pump. I briefly skimmed over the links and it doesn't sound too hard to accomplish. The hardest part will be getting the parts since my local suppliers screw up even the simple orders i give them never mind oddball requests where i can't tell them the year/make/model to punch into their computer. And that dodgeconnection website is the shit. I went to it to order that bracket and pretty soon i had over $1000 in my cart, so i think i'll hold off ordering anything from there until i know exactly what i need.
mopar65pa - Nice! Now that the easy part is done its time for the hard part, but for some reason i think your going to have a hard time sandwiching that into a mercedes. You should post a pic of the truck you said it was going in.
Well now we had the motor stuffed into the ole rust wagon. Time to focus on the tranny and t-case. When we bought the donor the owner told us he cooked the tranny. So before we pulled everything out and had the motor running we tested it to see what was wrong with it. The clutch worked fine but as soon as you tried to drive away it would stall. It also didn't feel like it was going in and out of gear properly. The t-case was a similar story, it didn't want to shift into neutral. Sure enough like we figured they both had a broken shift fork. The best guess we have is that he got it stuck in the mud from all the dirt on top of everything and was rocking it back and forth under full throttle, tried to slam it from 1st into reverse and broke both the forks since it turned out to be the 5th/reverse fork that was broken in the tranny.
That's right around the time the headache started. After we popped the top cover off the tranny and seen the broken fork we ordered a new one, as well as one for the t-case even though we hadn't opened it yet we were pretty sure that was what was wrong with it as well. After waiting the usual 2 weeks for the forks we find that they don't come with new roll pins to install them. Great. So back to the parts store to order some. After waiting three weeks on the pins we finally get told that they have no record we ordered them in the first place... FFS. So we got some other pins that would work. The only problem with the pins we got was that once they were in, they were in. We popped them both apart, got them all together and figured we were free and clear. Before installing them we decided to give them a quick test to make sure they were shifting properly. T-case worked fine, but when we went to shift the tranny the cap on the end of the shift fork shaft popped out and a little ball bearing fell on the ground. ****. The ball bearing had fallen out of place when we were installed the fork and we never noticed. Of course now the fork is on there for good. We spent 20 minutes beating on that pin trying to remove it and it wouldn't so much as budge and finally called it quits when we noticed that the new shift fork had broken from all the hammering. **** **** **** double ****! So two months later and we still don't have a working tranny.
Here is our transmission repairshop on its first day of business. BTW i guess i could have mentioned sooner but my dad has been helping me throughout the build. He is a retired heavy duty mechanic with 40+ years experience working with diesels and all things bolted and greasey, so he has been the go to guy whenever i needed help repairing anything.
Here's what a getrag 5 speed looks like on the inside. We, and by we i mean my dad gave it an inspection while i nodded my head knowingly and figured the syncros were worn down a little but neither one of us wanted to rip the whole tranny apart if i may end up going to a 6 speed in the end. But otherwise it appeared to be in good shape.
If you have your 5 speed out and are going to be changing the fluids anyways i would recommend popping off the one side cover. If you look inside tucked away in the bottom is a magnet, and if yours is anything like mine it will be caked in metal. I couldn't figure out how it came out, didnt want to break it or not be able to get it back in, so what i found that worked great was a telescopic pen magnet. It was able to pull off 95% of the metal that was stuck to it and the varsol/paint gun that i have was able to get the rest when we washed the tranny out.
Here she is freshly painted with a little tremclad flat black waiting to disappoint us with her first test run before installation.
At this point i've run out of photos. I'll have to come back and edit my post to add them later
So rather than let the tranny ruin our schedule we decide to install it anyways as is, since the tunnel is removeable in the ramcharger and we can easily install the top cover at a later date when we find a replacement. And depending on how long that takes we can always just bolt on a cardboard cut out to keep the oil in and shift the tranny manually into the gear we want to drive it into the shop and complete the build.
So we drug the tranny under the truck, got it bolted to the engine and went to install the donors crossmember since it looks to be a beefier unit. What we found was that the bolt holes were roughly a half inch out. Neither one of us figured it was a good idea to drill a bunch of new holes in the frame weakening it considering how many of them there are and the weight they are supporting. Add to that the top bolts would be near impossible to get out of the frame.
Our first bright idea came to us while we were leaning on the front of the truck and noticed that the bolt from the engine mount going into the rubber block under it wasn't centered. It was roughly a half inch out. So what we did was pull both the motor mounts off and swapped them out to the other side of the engine which shifted the motor enough to get all the bolts through the crossmember. Hooray, or so we thought. While underneath the truck admiring our handywork i noticed that the engine was now tilted at an odd angle and after further inspection my suspicions were confirmed when we realised that the motor mounts are different heights to each other and now it sat leaning to one side. So after undoing the afternoons work we started brain storming again. Not all was lost though since through that experiment we knew roughly how much the engine needed to move to line it all up and come up with a fairly easy and simple solution
In between the transmission and the crossmember is a steel plate. The tranny is bolted to the steel plate closer to the middle and the plate is bolted to the crossmember near the edges, with a bunch of rotten rubber pucks in between. The holes in the plate that the transmission bolts go through are actually oblong. So what we figured was all we needed to do was make the oblong holes a little longer. We took it into a machine shop and for 20 bucks had them cut the holes out a half inch further, and voilla all the bolt holes lined up along the frame and the crossmember is finally in. And sorry i never took any photos of the plate and kind of regret it now, but i think once you have the parts in hand it will be easy to figure out what it was that i did to make it work.
edit*** Here is the plate installed with the bolt holes pointed out. FYI it is really hard to draw straight lines with a laptop touch pad.
Edit2 alternatively we figured out after the fact you can spin the plate 180 degrees and it will line up and you don't have to hog out the holes. We were thinking at the time it needed to be in the original orientation but it turns out no. There is a tab for bolting something to the plate we couldn't remember at the time if it was used for anything. Guessing its for mounting a PTO, so just spin it and you should be golden.
And that's pretty much it for progress on the truck right now. When i get back home i'm hoping to get the front end back on, get the wiring started/completed, then its just waiting for the borgeson shaft and injectors to show up in the mail and she can be moved in for body work and paint. So from here on out the posts will come a wee bit slower since now i'm working out of town and you are all caught up on whats been done thus far.