Car-wise, its been tough the past few months. My daily drive Merc decided to throw all mannner of bearing and brake issues at me a while back causing me to lose all trust in it. Cue a 2.5k Saab purchase in a bid to remedy the unreliability woes. Not likely... the Saab did not once make it home without a sensor failure or engine warning light coming on in the entire 3 week period I had it. Needless to say after a long and arduous battle I got my money back on it. Now taking delivery of a BMW coupe on Monday, but as there is light at the end of the tunnel I decided to re-focus on the project that has been laid up for a while... the Camaro.
Took the box down to a gearbox specialist near Kilwinning to have them strip it and conclude once and for all how bad it is. On the plus side the fellas there commented on the utter brutality of the box - even reverse looks like it was out a truck!
The bad news though is that the gearing linking the input shaft to the layshaft is excessively worn, and was most likely the cause of the noise I have been hearing from the day I got it. Most likely this has been due to running on no oil at some point in its life. I have been told that it will run fine if re-assembled but the noise will remain. There are no spares or suppliers for spares of this box type anywhere. Worse than that the gears are integral to the input and layshaft, so both of these entire parts need to be changed to cure the problem.
As such I'm in a bit of a sticky wicket. I could persevere and put the getrag 290 back together, top up with thick oil and hope it lasts whilst enduring it sounding like a raped cat.... or source another one from the hens teeth factory down the road... or remorgage my house and source a T56 box which is frankly the only equal to what I have that will hold up to the abuse.
Not been my best month all in.
In the meantime I have been tinkering away with the engine itself:
...which is re-timed, cam installed and re-assembled. Would have been ready for a test fire too had I not bought Mr Gaskets finest sh1te intake gaskets which leave blatant vacuum gaps between the heads and the manifold...
Also, the cage I bought a while back has been test fitted:
So I reckon it needs some mild shoogling to get in as close as possible, but otherwise its s fairly good fit. Thats been about it for the moment. Waiting on a solution for the gearbox situation to fall from the sky and save my ass... but turning blue from holding my breath waiting for it to happen...
:(
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