Tremec TKO 600
- Thread starter Meat Drapes
- Start date
Got a wild hair up my butt and dropped engine and transmission back in....was going to wait until tomorrow. Took 30 minutes. Pics to follow with front crossmember clearance. Without the front clearance none of this would have been possible. Pan sits inside recess about a 1/2 inch. Tanny rests nicely on crossmember as it should. Solid mounts have just enough 'give' to allow the engine to rock back enough to slide the transmission into the bell/clutch.
Today I had the car out and ran through the gears. The new shifter offset is tight but I could not get a good feel of what all of the gears will be like with a Big Block. The cover that shields the offset arm interfered with Third and Fifth gear. I knew I had good clearance before the engine swap so why was there a problem now? It would seem that the new offset arm is a larger piece of billet and it was hitting the shield. For now I have removed the cover. Now everything feels better. Tomorrow I will see how Fifth gear feels and check to make sure there are no driveline vibrations.
All gears feel nice. transmission feels just like it did with the 327. No shifter issues. Clutch feel is good with the 454. I called Keisler again ( never thught I would) and let them know I had installed thier new offset billet shifter. I let them know that there was an issue with the new peice hitting the cover. Guess what? They have a new one that takes that into account. Why couldnt they send it with the shifter? So its on its way. No charge.
Went for a ride today and as I got close to home I began to have a hard time shifting. I could not down shift. Felt like the clutch was partially engaged. As I crept home the only way to get into any gear was to rev the engine to sync up the gears. Clutch is not disengaging properly. I looked at the linkage and it looks fine. Need more trouble shooting.
Crawled under the car and the linkage has not changed. Can a clutch stick to the pressure plate or flywheel? Maybe get hung up on the input to the transmission? I added some more threads to the mech linkage to get a deeper pedal for more release. This helped and I can drive it. But sometimes if I want reverse it grinds like mad. If I pop into 4th to go to reverse it just slips right in. How is it sticking?
Mech linkage. Clutch engagement is smooth. There is no noise. I doubt throwout bearing. I can see in the bell where the fork enters. I watched engagement and disengagement while the car was running... everything looked very smooth. I even took it back out and tried to start in second gear AND third. No problems. Its somehow sticking(clutch). That is the only thing I can come up with.
Is 4th the only gear it'll keep from grinding? I was reading a writeup on things to help extend manual trans life, and it said put it in any forward gear, then reverse. It keeps the gears from clashing basically (don't recall what exactly they said it does). I think that was in Car Craft. My old 3-speed does the same, but if I put it in any forward gear it doesn't clash at all. I'm running the factory-installed linkage from a junkyard Malibu, from the pedals down to the clutch fork/bellhousing. Only new part is the pivot for the fork pushrod, original was pretty worn. It's worked great for me the 8 months or so of driving in the 6 years or so that I've had it.
