Another weekend of wrenching began this morning with me slowly moving on, drilling out the necessary holes on the firewall so that I could install the clutch master clyinder on the car. Things go great and the cylinder gets installed as well as the clutch pedal. The lines from the automatic transmission come out smoothly and its time to move onto the next job, the torque converter.
Now, I had already removed the transmission last week flawlessly but I didn’t bother with the converter, now I know why.
I had discovered an faq that would help me take off the torque converter but the reference image no longer showed up. All I remembered from the text was several 10mm bolts that needed to be tackled and I was ready to go outside and pound it out. Heres how I decided to do it.
Step number one.
Punching myself in the face with the end of a rachet.
I squeezed a rachet extension between the engine and the flywheel and it was pretty snug. I tried to get it in position so that I could tackle one of the 10mm bolts spoken about previously. The extension was a tight fit and I was holding it while attached to the rachet. I was moving it around and it got hung up and wedged… now comes the fun part. I did a ‘yank’, as in a pulling with efficient force towards myself. Unfortunately, I seemed to have forgotten where my face was at the time, and the ‘yank’ pulled the rachet out of the socket extension, going full out into the corner of my forehead.
HOLY FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU…
I hold my face, I stomp my feet, I partially do the squirming worm on my rolling ped.
I scream and wryth it off like a baby and I’m able to move on after a couple of minutes.
Haven’t felt pain like that in a long long time.
Step number two.
Drop a 40 pound Torque Converter onto the tip of your middle finger.
So I start taking the bolts out of the back of the flywheel after I’ve removed the necessary bolts from the previous little job that I made for myself. There are 4; 14mm bolts that attach the torque converter to the flywheel. It sound simple enough right? 4 bolts… but wait… I remember in the faq reference, something about getting somone to help you with this as a bonus.
I know the torque converter is heavy, and I space myself so that it doesn’t land on me. I take out the first three bolts without any issues, but that gosh darn last one. It decides that it wanted to get hung up on the flywheel and just sit there. Instinctively, I knew, OH, it must be the weight of the Torque Converter pushing down on the bolt, if I releave some of the pressure, then it’ll come out with no problems! Great! Lets DO this!
O’DOYLE RULES!!!
not…
The moment I apply upwards pressure onto the torque converter with my hand underneath, the bolt shoots right out, and the torque converter follows the rules of gravity which we all follow. I have pretty decent hand reaction times but no cigar, it crushed the living fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu… out of the tip of my middle finger.
BOOK IT!!! AHHHHHHHHHHH AHAHHAHAHA
Start running right out onto the driveway jumping up and down, Guy drives buy in a caravan looking at me like I’m an idiot. It didn’t hurt as much as getting powned in the face, but I knew that inside the glove that finger was exponentially increasing in size.
Pull the gloves off, thats it! I’m done!
So as I type, I’m using just the fingers on my right hand, with ice wrapped around my head and an egg sized lump above my eye, and ice wrapped around a middle finger that is twice the size as all of my other digits…
Last time I checked which was about an hour ago, my forhead looked like bloody knuckles and my finger was purple. awesome!!!
You know what though… I can’t wait to get back out there after dinner.
