Skip to main content

Seal replaced, back on the road!


Last night things moved ahead considerably.  I was very happy to see that the replacement seal arrived priority mail (from idparts.com - they've never done me wrong) on Monday, after I ordered it on Friday night.  I also went out and found a seal puller (similar to the one pictured) at Sears, of all places.  None of the regular auto parts stores carry this thing for some reason.
The elusive seal puller I finally obtained.
It worked magically at getting the old seal out - at least compared to the other crap I have tried in the past.  It did still make a few marks in the soft metal seating surface of the transmission sleeve.  One thing I noticed is that the driver side of the transmission does not have a removable sleeve, like the passenger side does.  So if you ding it up too badly I guess you're just completely out of luck. Seems crazy.  Anyway, I greased the crap out of the new seal, and got it to set in using a 2 1/8" hole saw turned backwards, and several 3/4" ratchet extensions (which fit perfectly into the hole of said saw).  The hole saw was pretty much the perfect diameter to apply even pressure to the seal using light taps with a hammer, and the use of extensions allowed me to get the hammer operation to happen outside the cramped space of the fender area.

After I got the seal in, the flange went in uneventfully (I used the control arm as a pry surface to preload the spring) and I immediately filled the tranny back up to see if it was going to leak.  After an hour and rotating the differential/axles, I was satisfied that things were okay.  I bolted the drive shaft back on, put the wheel back on and went for a little test drive.

Everything felt pretty good, overall.  Shifting was fairly smooth, although 5th is still occasionally fussy.  I think I just need to adjust the linkage, as it feels like the shifter can move too far to the right.  

5th gear, by the way, is definitely different in terms of ratio.   The car goes about 30 mph at idle, and 45 mph at just a hair over.  I haven't had it on the highway yet, but I'm curious to see where things stand around 72-75 mph.  I'm guessing it will be around 2000-2200 rpm.

Anyway, pretty much case closed at this point.  I have a few more accessories to reattach, but I have to do some cleanup underneath the car, as most of the previous transmission oil leak is still all over it.  I'll report back in a few days after I've had a chance to really monitor any possible persisting leaks.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reaper, Linux, and the Behringer X-Air - Complete Studio Solution, Part 1

Introduction and Rationale This is part one of a major effort to document my experiences with recreating my home studio, entirely using Linux.  Without getting into too many of the specifics, a few months ago I decided that I was unhappy with Windows' shenanigans - to the point that I was ready to make a serious attempt to leave it behind.  For most in this situation, the obvious choice is to switch to Mac OS.  With its proven track record, support, and options for multimedia production, it is naturally the first alternative to consider if your goal is to simply use something other than Windows. For me the choice was not so simple. I despise Mac OS and, in general, the goals and philosophies put forth by Apple in an effort to ostensibly provide users with an "easy" working environment.  It does not help that I have also failed to find any aspect of the Mac OS UI intuitive, but I realize that this is a subjective matter. With my IT background and user-control* favori
Post a Comment
Read more

An Alternative Take on AI Doom and Gloom

 I've purposely held my tongue until now on commenting about "AI" (or, more specifically as has come to be known, GAN or Generative Adversarial Networks).  It seems like it is very in-style to complain about how it has made a real mess of things, it is displacing jobs, the product it creates lacks soul, it's going to get smart and kill us all, etc. etc.  But I'm not here to do any of that. Rather I am going to remind everyone of how amazing a phenomenon it is to watch a disruptive technology becoming democratized From the time of its (seeming) introduction to the public at large, around November of 2022, to late 2023, the growth and adoption rate has been nothing short of explosive. It features the fastest adoption rate of any new technology ever, by a broad margin.  To give a reference, the adoption rate for AI image and text generation, real-world uses, in just 12 months is comparable to all of that of the another disruptive technology, the World Wide Web, takin
Post a Comment
Read more

RANT TIME: Why do replies to a message I sent go to my spam folder?

Despite what one would think/hope, sending a message to a given address does not inherently give Google a high confidence that a reply from this address is expected (and, for example, that it should bypass spam checks). I have confirmed with Google's tech support that there is no way to automatically have this happen. The user can do the following: 1. Add the address to your contacts list in Gmail. 2. Check spam folder for replies, and mark it as "not spam" if something ends up there, which should influence the fate of future replies received. I can also approve an address at the domain level, i.e. if it is a big vendor or similar. I've had to do this with several of our Chinese vendors. I regularly ask engineering and purchasing to give me a list of the supplies we deal with, so I can approve them as a preventative measure. For what it's worth, all of the false positive instances of reply -> spam we have experienced have involved the sender's email server
Post a Comment
Read more