Okay, so the next day was the big day… The tired 302 was unhooked, unplugged and unbolted…and ready to be pulled.

Oh yeah, check out my favorite hood holder… (There just wasn’t a better place to put the darn thing.):

Since the action was about to get critical, I didn’t get a whole lot of pics for this next part of the engine swap/picker dance.

So, once the old engine was out, it was time to make sure everything was ready to get the new one in. While my husband cleaned the engine compartment (I dunno why, but I really suck at cleaning and hate doing it. Lucky for me, he’s good at it and enjoys it.), I scraped the old gaskets from the headers and made sure everything was ready.

Again, during the dance, I didn’t take pictures because our hands were full, but we got the new one engine in okay. And unlike last time, we torqued the flexplate to 80-85 so that I don’t have to pull the tranny again when the bolts work their way loose. That was not my favorite kind of automotive adventure… (Especially the aspect of someone other than myself fucking up, but I was the one stuck with fixing it. That sucked all around.)

There were a few difficulties along the way, but the darn thing is in there.

It has been a few months and gradually, we’ve gotten bits hooked up and plugged in, but we both got really busy and since we’ve got other rides, this project went to the back burner for the most part. As I write this, we are literally one heater hose fitting and a radiator away from starting the car… Oh, and an oil change, too. Can’t forget that. Here’s hoping for some time to get it all done.

Back in March, I began another engine swap. Big job, but I enjoy it. Welcome to my world:

Those fenders on the roof are for my fastback. After 9 years of being irritated by having ‘67 fenders on my ‘68 fastback, finally having the right fenders is gonna be suweet!!! I’m all about personalization, but I always hated having the wrong fenders. They were what was available at the time, though, so they went on my car after the wreck. My wonderful husband buys me car parts instead of jewelry and flowers and other frou-frou bullshit. How can I complain? He knows how to make me happy…

Since I’m so small, I can slide underneath without needing to jack up the car much… So there I am!:

This next series…I dunno. I just like the way it looked. I was pulling the starter and my husband was snapping pictures. Y’know, leaving the dirty work to me…:

And since I seem to learn something new each time I work on my cars, this time was no different. I discovered that this is the car’s original starter! It still works great, too:

Notice my muscles? Oh yeah… I’m a tough chick. Uh-huh. They’re a whole 7 inches around. Yep. You afraid now? Uh-huh. You know you’re terrified of my wimpy girlyness… Uh-huh… Check out my girly manicure, too:

That’s some scary shit, isn’t it? I’m amazed they stayed so clean!

I’m a little behind on my posting here. Life got busy for awhile and I didn’t have time to do more than a carb adjustment or two.

However, right after my last post, it was decided that the time had come to swap out the tired, seemingly unreliable 302 in my 1968 Mustang convertible with the reasonably new (only had about 5K on it when we pulled it out of my 1968 Mustang fastback), very reliable-feeling 302 that had been sitting on a stand, collecting dust for a few years.

It’s not that the engine in the vert was actually tired or unreliable, it just didn’t sound good. Piston slap, exhaust leaks…and why fix it when you can replace it with something better–which was the original plan when we dropped the 347 into the fastback.

Since my vert is my slow cruiser, it doesn’t need to go fast. It just needs to be reliable and fun. Thus, the reason we pulled the 302 from the fastback to put in the 347. That particular 302 was too smooth. It was a crate motor for a ‘94 Explorer. GT-40 heads and all. Ran great, but just wasn’t the hard, balls-out spanking that my fastback is about.

So, here’s the “Before” picture of my vert:

Yeah, that’s factory a/c. It hasn’t worked since I got the car, but it is factory. For the last 6 years, I’ve been saying I’ll make it work “next year” and you’ll see later why this year might actually be “next year”.

And here I am, ready to work. Got my hair covered already and I’m just sooooo excited to dive in:

Yes, you read that right. I was excited to dive in:

Strangely enough, both first casualties happened within the first hour or so. I wrecked my knuckle because I didn’t leave enough clearance breaking loose a bolt. It was bound to happen at least once and I’m glad I got it out of the way early:

The other first casualty happened to be the only casualty…and the reason why this year very well could be the year the a/c will work. But let me just say for the record, that I was not the one operating the wrench when this happened. This was compliments of my husband and while it was kind of a bummer, he promised he’d buy the replacement and get the rest of the system in working order. I can hardly complain. (I also wasn’t pissed in the first place, but don’t tell him that. He just felt bad and wanted to make reparations, so I wasn’t about to turn down the best excuse to get the a/c finally working! I’m sure it’ll be a team effort when the time finally comes.) I’m still kind of amazed that this was the only part that got broken beyond repair:

This was a weekend in March. It should’ve stayed cold, but SoCal weather warmed up enough that I had to change my shirt…to something more appropriate and girly…just ’cause. In the background was our ‘92 Camaro Heritage Edition. We sold it a few weeks after doing this engine swap because the car was so awesome and we just didn’t have the space, nor could we take care of it the way a car with only 3K miles on it needs to be taken care of. It has since gone to a perfect home somewhere in Florida. I miss the car, but since we couldn’t drive it, all it did was take up space, so I’m kind of glad it is now with someone who can more fully appreciate it:

The day my new coveralls arrived, I was thrilled beyond words. Being a whole lot smaller than man-sized, coveralls are a pain in the ass to find in my size. Even the ones I found online were too big, but they were close enough. Plus, my name is Toolwench, I have the tools to make a pair of coveralls smaller. I haven’t yet, but sheesh, they’re coveralls, not a slinky evening gown. They can be a little baggy.Anyway, here’s a shot of my new coveralls…

I finally had a chance to use them when I needed to drop my tranny. This was the first time in about 13 years that I’d opened my Haynes manual because I didn’t know how to do something. I was suspicious of either a cracked flexplate or busted torque converter. Turns out, the flexplate was just loose. And it was my husband’s fault!!!!! If you scroll all the way down to when we did the engine swap, that’s him with the torque wrench.Oh well…At least it wasn’t a busted crankshaft.

I didn’t take a whole lot of pics during this endeavor. It was one of those times when I didn’t really know what I was doing so I needed all my brainwaves focused on the task at hand. I’m little. The tranny’s big…and a big job for me to do. But I did it. Virtually without any help, either. The only things my husband did were because he was kinda bored and I wasn’t goin to turn down free help even if I could do it myself.But I definitely made sure that *I* was the one torquing the flexplate and re-connecting anything that’d be a pain if he’d accidentally screwed it up. This was a project I had zero interest in repeating…at least not for another 13 years!Naw! Actually, now that I’ve done it once, I know what to expect and the next time I have to do it, it’ll be a lot quicker and even more fun.This pic just looks nifty to me. You can see my reflection in the oil pan and, I dunno, that’s just artsy or something to me. I dig it.

Notice how dirty I was? That’s nothin’! My tranny had been leaking and getting steadily worse. On the day I got the car buttoned back up, I kept getting pissed off because it seemed no matter where I grabbed under the car, my hand got filthy and slid off. I’ve since solved the cause of that problem, but she still needs a good steam cleaning.Funny, how I started this post by mentioning my new coveralls and I’ve gotten this far before realizing that in the two pics, I wasn’t wearing them. That day just happened to be a little to warm. Believe me, my new coveralls saved me from puddles of tranny fluid, pounds of scraped-off grime and provided a nice warm layer of protection from the cold concrete on the days that I did wear them.Let me go look for an action shot…Yeah… Here’s one from the early troubleshooting days when I thought I had some kind of engine problem rather than the flexplate/tranny problem it turned out to be.

Special thanks again, to all the people at CarCrazyCentral.com who watched my video and then suggested what might be wrong. This would’ve been so much harder without all that help!

For an experiment (and because I really didn’t know what was wrong and had exhausted my resources), I’d made a little video which I posted at CarCrazyCentral.com in hopes that someone might know what my car was suffering from. Here it is again…

And their advice worked! I felt confident about diving in and dropping the tranny even though I’d never done it before. I knew it’d be a lot of work, but as long as it needed being done in order to fix the problem, I was completely willing to do it. And here’s what happened…

Never again will I trust Jason with a torque wrench. I love him dearly, but unless he’s willing to go through what I did in order to fix the car (he’s not), he is no longer allowed to use a torque wrench on my car. I let him do stuff that isn’t as critical or is easy to get at, but nothing that involves dropping a tranny or pulling a motor. I’ve learned my lesson!!!!

Beyond that, here’s a funny little story that happened during the flexplate fiasco:

I was under the car, trying to line up the tranny on the jack to the engine and I was really having a hard time. I only weigh a hundred pounds, so I don’t have a lot of leverage unless I’m grabbing onto something under the car. Yoga has made me immensely stronger, but come on, I’m too little to effective all the time.

So, there I am, under the car. The tranny pan had been leaking forever and the whole underside was not just grimy, it was slippery, too. Every time I tried to grab something while fighting with the tranny, my hand–or foot–would slip. I sighed in defeat and crawled out from under the car. I was so pissed, I didn’t pay attention to how well I wiped off my shoes or my hands as I went inside to ask for Jason’s help in getting the tranny lined up so I could put a few bolts in.

Well, during that expedition, I made a nice little footprint path from the garage to the living room–on our white carpet. Needless to say, he wasn’t thrilled. At the moment, getting my car back together was way more important than dirt on the carpet, so I mollified him with, “I’ll clean the carpet tomorrow if you help me get the tranny lined up.” He was still pissed, but we got the tranny in and he even stuck around to help bolt up the exhaust and get the starter back in.

Later that day, I called Eddie. He’s got miracle cures for stuff like dirty carpets. He told me to use some OxyClean with a little laundry detergent in order to get the the carpet to come clean…maybe.

The next day, I set about doing that. It worked great! So great, in fact, it left clean spots! Grrrrr…

While Jason wasn’t thrilled about that, either, it did prompt us to go out and buy a carpet cleaner. Ignoring the ‘use only our brand cleaner’ bullshit warning in the owner’s manual, he used Eddie’s recipe of OxyClean and laundry detergent and did the whole house!

We’d been considering getting tile or at least replacing the carpet, but thanks to Eddie, my mishap and Jason, our carpet has never been whiter…

This is one of the many reasons I love cars. That little tranny foray saved us probably ten grand in unnecessary home improvement money!

Why did I title this entry “It’s Inevitable”?

Here’s exactly why:

Whenever I hand a camera to a guy and say, “Could ya snap a couple of shots of me workin’ on the car?” there’s always at least one of my ass!!!! Oh well… All in good fun, I suppose.

I dunno what it is about me and working on my car, but I really enjoy sitting in the engine compartment while I work. It also seems to cut down on the back strain somehow.

This is my least favorite thing to do. I dunno why, but I hate scraping gaskets off and cleaning the surface. It’s not that I suck at it or anything. And I have lots of patience for it, but I’m thinkin’ maybe I just like to have a tool in my hand rather than a rag.

I figured that while I was there, I might as well retorque the heads. Sadly, I’ve only got a hundred pounds to put behind a torque wrench. Leverage is my best friend.

The next couple shots are the struggle to get the intake back in. Yeah, it’s easier to pull the distributor so it’s out of the way, but as of late, it has been easier to work around the distributor than have to re-stab it. So, here I go, getting the manifold back in without smearing the silicone.

Not too shabby. I’m leaving out the oddyssey of the bolt hole that needed tapping in the head, the metal shavings everywhere, the second oil change and the initial silicone mess during my first failed attempt at getting the intake on. Those aren’t important…*cough, cough* (Yeah, they’re just what working on cars is really all about: adventure!)

The next shot was from when everything went smoothly…

Okay, smoothly except when I accidentally sprayed carb clean on the Band-Aid over my busted knuckle from the day before. Yeah, I hit it so squarely that the pad soaked up the carb clean and transmitted it to my open wound before I could get the darn thing off and quit being grumpy about it. (Hey…it stung…a lot…)

After a few more grumpy faces and a whole lot more cussing, I got back to torquing down the manifold.

And at the end of the adventure, I was one seriously happy little chick. I love my car. I love my car. I love my car!

Jason didn’t think I could pull my intake in 20 minutes. Well, here’s proof. (We didn’t have a stopwatch running, though. It might’ve taken me closer to 25 minutes because I wasn’t actully in a hurry to proove anything. I mostly just wanted to show Jason that I could do it and it really wasn’t that big of a deal.)

There’s really not much involved… I started with the fuel line so that I could get the carburetor out of the way.

I don’t recall how, but I’d already busted a knuckle. Can you believe it? (Okay, yeah, so it’s not hard to bust a knuckle while working on car. At least it wasn’t bad enough to drip blood everywhere… I just kept on workin’.) And it’s not like I’d be sticking my middle finger in puddles of gasoline or carb cleaner or just about every other automotive fluid–’cause they all hurt!

The car was still kind of warm… Luckily I had a few shop rags close by to use as…uh…potholders.

I was trying to beat the clock while not actually rushing. The first socket I’d found happened to be quarter inch, so I ran with that instead of digging out my three-eighths set up. I’m an equal opportunity tool wench.

And here you have it… Me climbin’ in to get better leverage and yanking out my intake manifold. Yippee!!

Putting it back together took more than 20 minutes, but after cleaning everything up, I could’ve easily done it…had my engine been a little more cooperative, that is…

And here we have the final post about the engine swap experience. I only wish I could’ve done an mp3 of starting up the car. 1) I didn’t even think of it. 2) If I had, it would’ve prolonged turning the key. I was so jazzed that my car was finally back together that I simply couldn’t wait a moment longer than necessary.

That final day, Jason and I were putting the last bits on the engine and buttoning everything up. As you can see in the following pic, I was glad that yoga is such a big part of my life now. Not only am I even more impossibly flexible, I’m also a lot stronger and both of those qualities come in handy while working on cars… Well at least they do for me!

The following is Jason’s favorite pic of the adventure. The car is together and we’re just about to start it. Right after this shot, we opened the garage door and I turned the key…and gas promptly leaked out of the fuel rail. Arrrrrrrrrgh! We didn’t get to officially start the car until the next day after I made a parts run. And wouldn’t ya know it? The darn thing started as though I’d just parked the car an hour ago. What an awesome sound that is, too–a new engine starting up. Yeah, there’s smoke and weirdness, but there’s also nothing like the satisfaction of a job well done.

Actually, I think that previous pic might’ve been just after I’d put in the starter. With headers on the car, it’s impossible to get the starter in without cranking the steering wheel. Jason had taken the starter out but then couldn’t figure out how to get it back in. He cranked the wheel while I went under while the car was still jacked up…And discovered that because starters are so heavy and my arms are so wimpy, the only way I’ve been able to wrestle with and install them is because my forearm happens to be the perfect length to tilt my hand back, cradling the starter while shoving it into place. We had to set the car back onto the ground because my arm got too tired holding up the damn starter! I’ve learned the funniest things about myself and how I work on cars…

Anyhow, this last shot (sorry it’s dark, my flash didn’t go off when I needed it), is after the test drive. My valve covers didn’t have baffles in them and too much oil was coming out of the breathers. We used Eddie’s method of tying red shop rags around the bases. Worked brilliantly! (And it’d be months before I solved this problem more permanently!)

There you have it!!!!! I’m a chick who works on cars and you’ve seen the photographic proof!

This post is a little weak on pictures. I have no idea why, but I only snapped a shot before I started working and then one later when I was done…but of myself, not the engine. Whatever.

Everything needed to be put on the front, everything needed to be hooked up. Everything, everything, everything except installing the headers…because Jason promised he’d help with that. I dunno why, but I wasn’t gonna turn down free help, either!

The following picture is an example of what I was always hated for. I used to work in a theatrical scene shop. I own grubby clothes and even coveralls, but rarely wear them unless I know without a doubt there’s a significant chance of getting dirty. Back in the day, I’d paint set pieces, backdrops, build stuff and somehow by the time I left the shop, my clothes would still be clean. Maybe a little dusty, but nothing I couldn’t brush off. I’ve done the same while working on cars, too. Yeah, it’s messy business, but a lot can be done without having to get dirty. Jason marvels at how my clothes remain clean even when there’s motor oil and grease gooping about.

And here I am, displaying my filthy hands and white shirt with only to two tiny dots of dirt after spending several hours getting the car back together. Granted, I stayed topside–anything on my back would’ve required either getting dirty or laying down on a towel, so I refrained–but there you have it… Only two little spots–one of which, the camera didn’t even pick up.

This post reminds me of one of my very first automotive expeditions. I was in my first year of college and had owned this car for about two months when I embarked on my first real project. I’d diagnosed the problem (car was overheating despite being full of coolant. Upon further inspection, I noticed that the coolant wasn’t circulating. Diagnosis=stuck/bad thermostat), opened my still-white-paged Chilton manual and read up on what to do while cross-referencing with my autoshop textbooks. (Good golly, that was sooooooo long ago!) At the time, my car was still as I’d gotten it from the previous owner…never been cleaned under the hood. It didn’t have any leaks, but it certainly had 20 years+ of road grime under there.

I sighed…I didn’t have coveralls yet, so I was going to have to make a few decisions. I went into my room and ever-so-carefully chose a t-shirt and jeans that I could get dirty–maybe even ruin–and be okay with that. This was very difficult for me. I loved my clothes very much and would never intentionally ruin them.

A few hours, a lot of new knowledge, and some impressive cussing later, I not only had a car that didn’t overheat, I had an absolutely filthy set of grubbies–properly seasoned as working-on-the-car clothes. Obviously, my mom wasn’t going to let me put those in with the regular laundry for fear of ruining other clothes, so they were set aside.

To this day, I have no idea how, but my mom got those filthy clothes completely free of stains! And suddenly, I was so pissed! I’d spent so long agonizing over which clothes to ruin and she’d gone and cleaned away my medals of honor. I laughed and thanked her, but darnit! all my proof of being a chick who worked on cars was gone. Oh, the horror!

I still chuckle whenever I think about it. Obviously, Mom and I are from two different worlds when it comes to dirt and it’s a damn good thing because otherwise, I doubt I would’ve learned how to stay so miraculously clean while I work!

Here it is. That crucial moment requiring a little bit of dancing. Jason and Jay are getting the new engine lined up with the tranny.

Eddie’s steering the picker.

It’s really, really close to being ready to bolt up.

And at long last, the boys are watching the topside while I crawl underneath to mate the flexplate with the torque converter. It’s a damn good thing I’m skinny! Between the floor jack under the tranny, the legs of the hoist and the car itself, I barely had enough room to do anything under there.

And here it is…with Eddie pointing to it. I have no idea why.

I’d like to say that the hard part is done, but really, nothing about any of this is truly hard. It’s just time consuming, tedious, and messy. In fact, whenever another woman asks me if it’s hard to work on cars, I usually say, “C’mon. Think about it. If a *guy* can do it…” And she usually replies with a knowing chuckle, “Good point. Probably pretty easy, then, huh?”

It can be.

But then again… I’m just a dumb girl. I dunno anything about cars.

Up next will be reassembly. Y’know, making the car actually run and drive. I sometimes think that’s the fun part.

It’s also the least fun sometimes because this is when you discover how many parts/nuts/bolts/etc. you forgot to pick up before you started the project. I swear, one of the worst things about working on cars is forgetting that damn $2 part. Y’know, like oil, a new battery cable, a few feet of fuel line or vacuum line. You can’t run the car without ‘em and it’s amazing how easy they are to forget until that very moment when you can’t hook something up or get something together. And then the car gets stuck sitting until you can make that parts run. Ugh.