Father & son having fun

Manual Transmission: Brandon here, today I took apart the Muncie 4 speed transmission which is used to switch gears in a car. It had a aluminum case. It took 2 hours to disassemble.  We used a press to extract the shaft. When we shook the box, needle bearings fell out. We also used a ratchet to remove the bolts and my dad showed me how to use the extension to quickly unscrew the bolt. We used socket sizes 9/16 and 5/8 to take out the bolts. I feel that this project will take longer than I anticipated. Brandon is in charge of this endeavor Broken down to major components Clearly this trans has seen water internally for some time  This thing has clearly had a hard life Dad here, overall, we had some concerns before cracking this transmission open mainly since the shaft wouldn't rotate and the shift arms wouldn't move.  This kind of seals the deal to pursue the TKO 600 transmission (5 Speed) which will bring better fuel economy, NVH (...

Engine Research : Selecting an engine has been the hardest part of this project.  Even though there are really only 3 real possibilities, each has its plus's and minus's: Big Block : Increased weight on the front half of the vehicle make it more of a point and shoot configuration throwing the handling out the window.  Although the thought of pure axle twisting torque is very enticing, the overall size of the engine also introduces some other challenges since I plan to have Air Conditioning in this vehicle. Small Block :  The typical small block resolves the issue of weight and space but there are fundamental limitations of extracting power while having durability (you can argue this with your friends all you'd like).  Ultimately I plan to drive this car for the next 25 years or more and fundamentally don't want to wrench on it endlessly...or let me down on a weekend outing. Modern LS : This engine has resolved a number of issues with the previous small b...

Home Again: The frame is done This morning I did the same Home Depot truck run to bring our frame home again.  Luckily, there wasn't any drama with the truck (actually, they gave me a new truck that just arrived).  Overall, I'm really please with the results.    The first process they performed was sandblasting, after which, the frame was sent to a metal shop for a few repairs.  It's amazing the number of items that are hidden until it's sandblasted, I would highly recommend this step regardless.  After speaking with the metal shop owner it makes a lot of sense, this frame was welded some 51 years ago where the technology (metallurgical) aspects and manual method was significantly different than today.  He pointed out that a bunch of dudes standing around doing the same weld all day, for weeks or months, could introduce some anomalies due to a lack of interest.  Regardless, they touched up a number of the "factory" welds a...