Thursday, April 4, 2013

B3R Garage: The Mad Scientist's Tranny Troubles

The Mad Scientist has cut, chopped, and welded his 1970 Ford Maverick into submission. We have finally been able to completely drop in the Ford 302 sb into the Maverick using truck mounts. We wired up the starter, and bypassed the transmission lines. However, as easy as cutting into the Maverick was it was about time it cut back!

The Maverick strikes back!


Tranny Attack

Everything involved with dropping in the small block ford went relatively smoothly until it came time to fire up the engine. The key turned forward. The starter engaged. The engine turned over, fired up AND the transmission started hemorrhaging fluid all over the garage floor! 

This was a known Good transmission that we were putting into the Maverick. So, the only think we could think of was, "WTF!!!!!!". After convincing ourselves that we were done crawling around on the hard cement under cars for a while, we found ourselves going back under again. The Mad Scientist was convinced that sliding the tranny around on its pan caused it to possibly cause the transmission pan to leak. So we spent a little over an hour draining the fluid and dropping the pan. We hammered the slightly warped pan back into shape and re-installed the old "unbroken or worn" gasket and slathered it with some sealer. 

Finally, we found ourselves crawling back out from under the Maverick once again. The Mad Scientist hit the key. The starter engaged. The engine turned over and fired up. Then the transmission started spewing even more fluid than before. In the words of the Grinch,

 "Bleeding worlds Unite!" 

Again, we crawled back under the 1970 Ford Maverick to try and determine what exactly the issue was. We pulled the transmission sat it on the ground, removed the torque converter, and removed the bell housing. Not sure as to why the transmission was leaking or from where we decided to call it a night. The following day we came to discover that it was possible the C4 pump gasket may have been damaged when we swapped the larger bellhousing for the smaller one (we had parts lying around to get the smaller one to work people-focus!). With the transmission out form under the car we propped it up and pulled the pump. Sure enough, the pump gasket was pretty much trashed all the way around. 

Scouring the internet for how much it might cost to get a Ford C4 pump gasket, the Mad Scientist stumbled across an awesome tranny website unknown to us. it is called Makco Transmission Parts. As it turns out the website has all the part we would ever need in order to rebuild our transmissions including paperback manuals and DVD's. 

If you are in need of tranny parts you should check out Makco Transmission Parts at the following link..


(note: you may need to copy and paste the link into the browser to get it to work)

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