78 280z trans/clutch/flywheel advice, car sitting 12 years!

[Mark Maras]

Wrestling trannys always brings back the memory of my first clutch job on a friends car. We made multiple attempts to stuff a cast iron 4-speed into an early Mustang. After about four or five muscle searing tries, we discovered the parts store had sold us the wrong disc. From that point on I always slid the disc onto input shaft and made sure there was no binding of any sort.

[Captain Obvious]

I'm thinking our introduction to tranny wrestling occurred at about the same time and on the same vein of cars.

Ahhhhhh... the smell of gear oil in your hair. Good times... Good times!

[Mark Maras]

12 hours ago, Captain Obvious said:

I'm thinking our introduction to tranny wrestling occurred at about the same time and on the same vein of cars.

Ahhhhhh... the smell of gear oil in your hair. Good times... Good times!

 Ahhhhh, the smell of gear oil in my bedroom. Many good first time mechanical stories. Another one being refreshing my first S30 trans on a 4' x 8' piece of plywood in my apartment bedroom. It was successful but my girlfriend (short lived) didn't appreciate the aroma that remained for about a month.

[Pop's Z]

Something I learned was to take two old head bolts and cut off the heads. They screw right into the block using the the two upper bolt holes. Makes putting the tranny back in much easier than trying to horse the whole thing while trying to line up the input shaft. You just slide the tranny over the old head bolts (sans heads) and ease it on in while turning the driveshaft yoke that you just happened to have laying around. We also used the driveshaft yoke to keep the fluid from running out while doing this job. Worked perfectly. Of course you have to have the head bolts and the yoke from other projects just laying around.

Cheers, Mike

[Patcon]

3 hours ago, Mark Maras said:

 Ahhhhh, the smell of gear oil in my bedroom. Many good first time mechanical stories. Another one being refreshing my first S30 trans on a 4' x 8' piece of plywood in my apartment bedroom. It was successful but my girlfriend (short lived) didn't appreciate the aroma that remained for about a month.

That's how you know if they are keepers or not.

I had a home made spray booth in my back yard and my first Z in there when I met my wife. She was good with it. So far it's worked out good...25 years

Unfortunately I still have a Z in a plastic spray booth...