January 14-15, 2006 - Turbo Install (4)
Removing the transmission mount should be straight forward.
There are two bolts and two nuts that need to be removed. The
nuts are in the middle of the mount and secure the mount to the
transmission, the bolts are off to the sides and fasten the mount to
the frame of the car. In the picture below, taken from the
back of the transmission looking towards the front of the car, the
nuts are in the two holes in the middle and the bolts are just out
of the picture on the right and left.
I said the
transmission mount should be straight forward but when working on a
car that's 10 years old and that's been owned by someone else for
all 10 of those years, things don't always go as smoothly as they
should. This is exhibit A documenting why you should never let
a local red-neck shop work on your car. Looking from the
bottom up at the transmission mount you can obviously see that the
nuts are different sizes.
When I put the impact wrench on the smaller one it rounded
the nut flats easily, the rust didn't help either, and we found ourselves in a sticky situation.
I should have checked the two nuts before I hit them with the impact
wrench but the light was dim under the car and I thought they looked
all right. However, I did take the time to snap the picture
above, but I didn't take an after picture of the rounded nut.
We didn't have a way to get the rounded nut off so we sat there a
minute and thought about the best way to get the transmission out. We could remove the bolts holding the mount to the frame
and go from there, but the added height of the mount might not allow
the transmission to clear the frame on the way out. So we took a break from the transmission and grabbed the
sawzall. The stock catback is much too restrictive for the
increased flow that the turbos provide so it needed to be removed.
There are two ways to get the stock catback out of the car - remove
the rearend from the car and drop the catback, mufflers and pipes,
down and out of the way; or grab a cutting tool and cut the exhaust
pipe. We opted for method #2 since it was less involved.
The first thing we did was cut the exhaust pipes just after the
axle. We had a little difficulty doing so because the front of
the catback was not secure since the stock h-pipe had been removed
earlier. This caused the pipes to waggle a little bit as I was
cutting them. After the pipes were cut, the exhaust pipe
hangers needed to be removed from the rubber supports so that the
pipes could be dropped and removed. This is always a challenge and
today was no exception. The best way to get the hangers out is
to lube them up a little bit and work them back and forth while
pulling them out. Eventually we were able to slide the metal
hangers out one by one, with a little cussing and fist pounding
along the way.
