It all started out with a simple transmission change. The original trans I got for $700 with 41000 miles was a scrapper. The yard traded me another with 60000 miles, so after another 8 hours round trip bringing a trans both ways, in my immaculate X Type, I thought my trouble was over.

While installing the 2nd trans, using my old trusty floor jack, the trans rolled off, and landed on my right hand, and put a huge gash in my palm, wrist, and elbow, and my fingers didn't work for around 20 minutes. Being a man, I wrapped the profusely bleeding gashes in my palm, and wrist in a shop rag, taped on with masking tape. Note-blood does not wash off a concrete floor.....

When the trans fell off the jack, it snagged the cooling lines and pulled them down. They were a little bent, so I just shoved them back up, and installed the trans, this time with an appliance I welded to mount at the top of the top of the floor jack. I filled the trans, and turned on the car, to keep adding fluid, with an electric pump, because I am too old to hand pump and keep from spilling expensive trans fluid.

As I was running and filling, I started to get drips from both cooling lines, in that never seen black hole, at the top of the trans. I disconnected and removed the cracked and bent lines, while pulling what was left of them through the front, near the radiator, that I had bypassed to use an external cooler with a fan, from my Vdub racing days. There wasn't much left I could use on the right side, so I made an inlet pipe, using the nut, a 3/8" copper tube, crimped onto a 1/4" tube with a ferrel, and soldered the whole mess together, bending the quarter inch tube around the catalytic converter, resoldering a 3/8" tube near the end of the run near the oil cooler. The left side was simply a cut the bent the tube and run a hose to the front, and connect to the oil cooler.

I am now in the process of securing the tubing and hoses away from possible heat sources, and covering them with bent steel, over rubber hose covering the tubes.

On the day this is complete, I will once again be flushing the trans fluid out, with the 40 liters of trans fluid I bought on craigslist, from a closing foreign auto shop that specialized in foreign cars, or until things come out clear.

After this, I will install my new original Dayton lug nuts on my wire wheels, and have the bumper resprayed, and the new windshield put in.

My wife convinced me to go to the hospital, and I have 2 cracked bones in my hand, and should have had stitches on my palm and wrist. She requested the hospital visit after seeing me attempt opening my jar of apple juice. It's amazing what you drink, after a youth drinking Jack Daniels, and Old Style beer, snorting coke, smoking weed, and being a good biker, husband, and dad, while working on drug dealer's exotics, until 3am, after a 10 hour day of impressing district service managers, and factory engineers, with my diminished sleep deprived work. The drugs and booze were just part of the scene, and I didn't use anything on my days off, with the family.

What can I say....the money was good.....but I could have probably gone up higher in the company, than teaching updates, at different dealerships. I was very good at my job, but could have been great, if I didn't muck up my life with the liquor and drugs. Maybe I could have been the surgeon, like mum wanted.

On the bright side, I still have my health........Time to go to listen to the priest at church.....Be cool....Mike

 

Man, back in the day I would.....ahhh...we don't need to go there...it's has amazed me how some of us made it though life, me included, without becoming a drooling idiot or worst until we grew up or evolved whatever ya want to call it.

Anyway sorry for the problems, I work by myself and am always banging up some body part. Nursing a busted up tumb now from a little run in with a chop saw.

Hope everything works out with the trans swap, be sure to keep us up to date.

 

The last transmission swap I did solo was on an XJ40. I've done a lot of work on cars over the years but a transmission with no help tops the list of difficulty in my book. It's not so much the weight as keeping the thing balanced during the lowering and lifting.

I hope your hand is soon mended and with no lasting impairment.

Graham