Sometimes, it’s the little things

The day my new coveralls arrived, I was thrilled beyond words. Being a whole lot smaller than man-sized, coveralls are a pain in the ass to find in my size. Even the ones I found online were too big, but they were close enough. Plus, my name is Toolwench, I have the tools to make a pair of coveralls smaller. I haven’t yet, but sheesh, they’re coveralls, not a slinky evening gown. They can be a little baggy.

Anyway, here’s a shot of my new coveralls…

I finally had a chance to use them when I needed to drop my tranny. This was the first time in about 13 years that I’d opened my Haynes manual because I didn’t know how to do something. I was suspicious of either a cracked flexplate or busted torque converter. Turns out, the flexplate was just loose. And it was my husband’s fault!!!!! If you scroll all the way down to when we did the engine swap, that’s him with the torque wrench.

Oh well…At least it wasn’t a busted crankshaft.

I didn’t take a whole lot of pics during this endeavor. It was one of those times when I didn’t really know what I was doing so I needed all my brainwaves focused on the task at hand. I’m little. The tranny’s big…and a big job for me to do. But I did it. Virtually without any help, either. The only things my husband did were because he was kinda bored and I wasn’t goin to turn down free help even if I could do it myself.

But I definitely made sure that *I* was the one torquing the flexplate and re-connecting anything that’d be a pain if he’d accidentally screwed it up. This was a project I had zero interest in repeating…at least not for another 13 years!

Naw! Actually, now that I’ve done it once, I know what to expect and the next time I have to do it, it’ll be a lot quicker and even more fun.

This pic just looks nifty to me. You can see my reflection in the oil pan and, I dunno, that’s just artsy or something to me. I dig it.

Notice how dirty I was? That’s nothin’! My tranny had been leaking and getting steadily worse. On the day I got the car buttoned back up, I kept getting pissed off because it seemed no matter where I grabbed under the car, my hand got filthy and slid off. I’ve since solved the cause of that problem, but she still needs a good steam cleaning.

Funny, how I started this post by mentioning my new coveralls and I’ve gotten this far before realizing that in the two pics, I wasn’t wearing them. That day just happened to be a little to warm. Believe me, my new coveralls saved me from puddles of tranny fluid, pounds of scraped-off grime and provided a nice warm layer of protection from the cold concrete on the days that I did wear them.

Let me go look for an action shot…

Yeah… Here’s one from the early troubleshooting days when I thought I had some kind of engine problem rather than the flexplate/tranny problem it turned out to be.

Special thanks again, to all the people at CarCrazyCentral.com who watched my video and then suggested what might be wrong. This would’ve been so much harder without all that help!

Comments are closed.