January 14-15, 2006 - Turbo Install (5)
While working on the exhaust we talked about our transmission
removal options and decided that we would try to lower the
transmission with the mount attached since we didn't have any other
options right now. We went back to the front of the car and
shimmied underneath it. The first thing we did was put a
scissor jack under the tranny mount. The pictures below show
the tranny mount to frame bolt on the passenger side and the scissor
jack supporting the rear of the tranny.
After the bolts were removed and the tranny supported I removed
the clutch cable shield from the front driver side of the
transmission. The pressure on the clutch cable needs to be
relieved before the cable can be slid out of the fork. I used
a big screw driver because I didn't have anything better. It
worked...
With
clutch cable released and the rear of the tranny supported we were
ready to attack the tranny to block bolts. There are 8 bolts
and 6 of them are easy to get to, the other 2 are arguably the
hardest bolts to remove on the entire car. Our plan was to at
least break loose the 6 easy bolts and then tackle the top two
difficult bolts. The easy bolts were, well, easy and we had
the 6 of them loose in a matter of minutes. We knew that
normally we would have to jack up the engine to get the top two
bolts but we always try to get them without jacking up the engine
because you never know, you might get lucky. We however didn't
get lucky in this situation. In previous
removals on other Cobras we used 3/8" drive socket, universal, and
extensions to get the top two bolts. We tried the same thing
here but failed. An electrical cable tab was in the way.
The tab is metal and protrudes from the transmission. We
grabbed the 1/4" drive stuff and tried again but we couldn't get
enough leverage with the smaller drive tools. Our only option
was to find the sawzall and hack off the tabs. We've done this
before with success and always try to avoid doing it, but we didn't
seem to have any other way of getting to the top bolts. A few
minutes later the tabs were history and we had a little more room to
get the 3/8" drive stuff up there but we still weren't happy
with the way the socket was sitting on the bolt head. With
frustration starting to set in we grabbed a jack and a block of wood
and headed to the front of the car. We loosened the motor
mounts and Dad started jacking up the engine while I watched the
transmission and rear of the engine to make sure nothing unexpected
happened. After a few pumps on the hydraulic jack I knew
something was amiss. I could see the jack going up but the
transmission wasn't moving the way I thought it would. As I
peered around to the driver side my eyes widened and I yelled,
"Stop!" The driver side turbo header was wedged up against where the
K-member meets the frame and was in danger of being dented. At
this point we realized that putting the turbos on before replacing
the transmission had just bit us in the ass. In order to
continue working on the tranny we'd have to remove the driver side
turbo header, tubes, and turbo... essentially undoing 1/2 of the
install we had just completed. Frustrated and dejected, we called it a
day.
