Tranny Time

This part of my project isn't for the faint of heart. This isn't a tutorial. I skip a lot of stuff like reaction sun gears, low/reverse clutch packs, center supports, anti-clunk springs, bearings, shims, thrust washers, etc. If you aren't up for the risk of failure, maybe even, a thousand miles down the road, you may be better off to stay in bed and cough up the money for someone else to do this.

The first thing I learned when I rebuilt my TH 350 transmission is that you are far ahead to just buy a rebuilt one. It's like everything else in life, if you have done a hundred of these you can blow through it perfectly in a few hours. My rebuild took days. Partly because it was a learning process. Mostly because I'm very meticulous with this kind of thing, want to know how it works and why plus have everything perfect. I'm sure a pro doesn't stop to run feeler gauges in every clutch pack and assembly, run a micrometer on every bearing that he seats, etc. However the Pro job comes with a warranty.

So, here's a sampling of my process.

Here we are completely gutted. Everything is out including internals, externals and valve body. When I take things out I keep them all in order and separated by section, which is another thing I'm sure Pro's don't bother to do. For example, I want to be able to see if a torrington bearing has uneven wear and if the matching thrust washer has it too. Without keeping them in order, I don't know how I could do that. A Pro probably has a better process.

This is a bearing I took out. It has little to no wear and looks new. the clutches and steels looked new too. I'm positive this tranny was rebuilt just prior to being parked 12 or so years ago. I needed to rebuild it anyway because all the gaskets and seals were leaking like crazy from dry rot and I needed to have a stage 2 set of steels and clutches to handle the power the motor will put out...someday.

While I was pulling the spring pack out of the forward clutch, I took the opportunity to take a picture of my highly sophisticated & technical transmission work bench. Ok, its a 1" X 12" pine board with a 1 5/8" hole drilled in it set on half a whiskey barrel.

Without the specialized tools, replacing the bearings in the pump can be tricky. I made my own tool by bending the end of a hardened steel rod and then grinding a chisel point on it. It's long enough to go through the interior of the pump stator. I had to keep grinding a new chisel point on the rod and tweeking the bend, but as you can see, it worked. The other tools I got from Autozone on their loaner program.

Not having a pump alignment tool, I went to Lowe's and bought a couple of large hose clamps. They worked fine to clamp the two halves of the pump back together in perfect position while they are bolted. On the stator, you can see one silicone ring seal and the rest are old school steel. I had placed all silicone rings on there, but when I pressure tested the forward and direct clutch assemblies, they wouldn't seal. I was told that silicone rings don't pressure test well. However, I decided to replace them with steel so I would know 100% for sure, that the clutch packs operated normally.

Then I started at the end. With the rear piston, output shaft which you can't see because, it's going out the back into the whiskey barrel, and the rear planetary gear.

I put the forward clutch and the direct clutch assemblies together to make installation easier. Another thing that makes installation easier is to line up all the tabs on the clutches as like I have done in the photo of the direct clutch pack. That saves you a lot of time trying to jitter them around and work them done into their drive assembly.

The assembled direct and forward clutches are turned over and worked into their place..

In go the steels and clutchs for the intermediate / 2nd gear clutch pack. I'm using the stage 2 high energy clutches and steels that are rated for up to 550 HP.

Lastly the valve body. this is where I had most of my issues. I decided to install a Transgo shift kit for a little harder shift and the ability to adjust a few things in the shifting if I decide I want to. Installing the kit basically amounts to swapping some springs in the valve body and governor. It all went pretty easy until one of the new springs (similar to the one furthest to the left in the picture) slipped out of my grip, binged off the wall in front of me and disappeared. I spent the next 2 hours crawling around my garage and looking in every nook and cranny for that tiny spring. I finally found it down in a pencil holder on my work bench. The next major issue which isn't shown in these pictures happened when a small "S" hook that connects the manual shift valve on the opposite side of this valve assembley, slipped off and fell down into the transmission. I had to take everything out, back to the rear piston to get to it, and then re-install it all. All told, I really rebuilt this transmission two or three times with the issues I had.