Good Art for Bad Eggs. Marc Nischan .com presents lowbrow art from the trenches of pop culture.
V-8 NIGHTMARE: Lost In Transmission
I had once heard a guy say that fabrication was easy. All you gotta do is put metal where you need it, and cut it out where you don't. Of course, that's total bullshit.
In what seemed to me a stroke of good luck when I installed the engine, the transmission crossmember was in exactly the right place to attach the tailshaft of the TH 350. Greatful for my good fortune, I bolted it right on to the crossmember, no mount, no nuthin'. After all, I hear about guys running no mounts all the time, especially in race cars, so this would surely make me faster. This was not only easier, but would make me tougher as well!
Mikey D, from a couple of pages ago, came over with his buddy Mark to grab his cherry picker back. With great pride, I was showing them what I'd been up to on the Chevy. They were suitably impressed until Mikey slid under the car on my creeper. Aside from Mikey being a crack mechanic, he's also a pretty nice guy. He can afford to be because he's also a kickboxer. He was good enough to point out that I would crack my tailshaft if I didn't have some kind of mount. I pitched my No Mounts Equals Tough theory at him, but he pointed out that I have motor mounts. They would give and the tailshaft wouldn't, so it would crack for sure. I saw the logic in that.
So, in a tremendous and largely unfounded leap of faith, I committed to fabricating my own crossmember. All I really had to go on was that that little bit of fabrication advice from a couple of paragraphs ago. Armed with that, and a SawsAll, I took my first stroll down fabrication lane. The first thing I did was get rid of everything I didn't need. From eyeballing the crossmember I figured that if I could find a way to make it straight across, that it would work. Then I bought some 1.75 inch square tube and some .375 inch plate steel.
I cut the tube to fit in between the nubs of the remaining crossmember, and then I put a piece of cardboard up on top of the tube and made a template for a mounting plate. Although I turn sheetmetal to charred wreckage when I weld, I can weld thicker stuff pretty good, so I fired up the Lincoln and stuck it all together. Then I clamped it in to place and drilled some mounting holes through the crossmember and the mountng plates.
This short series of pictures represents a solid 8 hour day of work hacking out the old crossmember and sliding in and out from under that car all day. That, I'm learning, is how it goes. This was kind of a setback, because it took so long, but on the other hand I'm sure glad that I didn't learn the hard way by lunching my new tranny. Now all that remained was to make up a plate to bolt the tranny mount on, and put it in. Which is what I did. It may not be pretty, but no one's ever going to see it unless they are run over, and then I don't think they'd care.
So I was one step closer to getting this heap on the tarmac, but I didn't feel like I'd even made a dent in this thing. What I really want is to fire this thing up. Hell, I can get by without heat, headlights, or even a speedometer, but It sure would be nice to get this baby fired up before the snow hits. Yeah, right.