Okay, Keith, here's a real hot rodder's story:
Way way back, once upon a time, when I was still
in high school, I bought a well-used Plymouth
'cause it had a V-8 and dual exhausts. It had,
what I coined, a typewriter transmission (push
button Torqueflite). Within a month, a friend of
mine, whose mother had a 59 Plymouth V-8 with
standard shift ,which she hated, convinced her
that we could swap everything out and she would
have a nice automatic transmission. We got the
transmissions swapped OK, but there was no place
on her dash to mount the shifter buttons. We had
to fabricate a bracket out of plumbing strap
(about which his mom was not real happy) in order
to mount the buttons to the dash. Meanwhile, in
my car, we had no way of hooking the shifter to a
column shift, since there was no column lever in
the car. We ended up making our own floor
shifter. Finally, after long hours of rigging
everything up so it would work, I drove off in my
nifty, floor shifting, dual exhaust, V-8
Plymouth. Within a week, the transmission blew.
In great despair, I accepted that the repair was
beyond what I could do, so I towed the Plymouth
to the local Mopar garage. When the mechanic got
it all apart, he called and asked me to come into
the shop. When I showed up, my car was up on a
rack, and the transmission and parts were spread
all over the floor and workbench next to the car.
The mechanic took the dead cigar from his mouth
and asked me who in hell had installed the
transmission in the first place. When I told him
a friend of mine and I had, he sighed and
informed me that we should have put a pilot
bushing in before installing the transmission. I
gave him a blank stare. Pilot bushing? The cost
of repair was far more than I could muster. I
sold the car to the shop and went out looking for
another car.
=====
Dick J
In East Texas
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