Well... Now that we have our house together and on the market... I’ve been putting more time into working on my truck. Ed Cooper has been helping me a lot with letting me use his lift out at his house. It has been a good bit of work, but it is starting to come together.
I’ll try to explain this to you all.. My transmission was slipping pretty badly when I left for Iraq. So, I knew I was planning on replacing it when I got home. After some unlucky issues with shipment, I received my transmission this week. I bought a TCI made Ford C4 transmission to replace the broken C4 that was in my truck. The new transmission was beautiful!... it was so clean when I pulled it out of the crate...
From the pictures, you’ll see that I removed the back half of my exhaust system to pull the old transmission off and put the new transmission up. I used the opportunity to seal up any leaks I saw in the system. It’s good to be home and working on my truck again.
Along with the transmission, I got a new transmission fluid cooler, torque converter, and shifter-- all from JEGS. We’ve had a bit of bad weather here lately, but the project is coming together nicely.
First, we removed the drive shaft from the back of the truck and removed the back half of my exhaust from the headers back. Then I drained all of the fluid out of the transmission and removed all vacuum lines, shifter brackets, and lines for the transmission fluid cooler. The lower plate covering the bell-housing was removed along with the starter next. Then I removed the crossmember supporting the transmission, all of the bolts attaching the motor flywheel to the torque converter, and all of the bolts attaching the bell-housing to the motor. After those bolts were removed, the transmission was carefully lowered and the dipstick was removed.
After the transmission was removed, I took the opportunity to clean up a lot of the parts on the underside of the truck, that you might not see too often... I also put new shocks on my truck. Elijah helped me out with finishing that up today. :) It was fun.
Putting the transmission back together has been the same steps in reverse order... with a lot of cleaning and additional care. I still need to do a few more odds and ends before I can start the truck up and drive it around the block... soon enough though. It’s nice not having to be in too much of a hurry about all of this.
The truck is looking good though. I’m really excited to drive it again after putting so much more work into it now. I’m pretty excited about it. I was really happy to have Elijah enjoy working with me on it tonight with the shocks. He was really excited about helping. It was really fun...
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WOW... that was a lot of detailed stuff in there for you Non-Automotive type people... sorry if I bored you with that technical mumbo jumbo... I am really happy about the work that I’ve been getting done on it though and I thought I would share that with you...
Being home is great. We had another showing on our house today. I hope the people make an offer. I guess we’ll wait and see if we hear anything. Traci and I have a drill pretty well down for showings... clean clean clean... It’s working out pretty well.
I feel a lot better about being home. Things are starting to feel more normal... well.. not with the rest of the world... but with Traci and the kids... things are going well.. It will just take some time to figure out Elijah’s little mannerisms... It’s different now because of how much more his personality has changed since he went to school. We are doing alright though. We got him a fishing pole for his birthday so we have fun doing that now too... (Except when it snows... ) HA!
After having temperatures in the lower 70’s off and on for the past few weeks... it dropped to 5 degrees yesterday after a night of wind and snow... Wow... really cold... It warmed up to 35 today though... so the snow is melting away...
Well.. I just thought I would update this with some pictures from today..
Take care,
Steve
