During the National Challenge event I started noticing a whine in forward gears, almost the same as when the car is in reverse. I drove an hour and half to go get some synchromesh fluid thinking that the transmission was low, but that wasn’t the problem. Driving around town, I’ve noticed that the car will sort of slip, especially during right hand turns. The clutch would be the first culprit, but the re-engagement is very harsh and slipping clutches have always been a little more gradual in my experience. The main suspects right now are the differential and the CV joints.
Two nights ago, I got the spare transmission and the diff with the Phantom Grip installed out of “storage” and started to get them ready for installation. I was missing the snap rings for the diff pin, so I picked those up yesterday and spent last night getting the differential installed in the transmission and the transmission reassembled. I poured syncromesh into every bearing I could see and used the Mopar gasket maker / anaerobic sealant to put a bead on the mating surface of the transmission. Getting the two halves to rejoin each other was quite a challenge — I eventually put the bellhousing on the ground and lowered the transmission onto it. Despite gentle massaging, I couldn’t get the transmission to rejoin itself, so I put the bolts in and slowly brought it together by tightening the bolts in something of a cross pattern.
Also, I picked up an oil pan from the junkyard yesterday. Since I’m going to be in there anyway, I think it might be a good time to drain the oil and swap out the oil pan. I have a bunch of fittings and hose from anplumbing.com so I can re-make the turbo oil plumbing to try to eliminate the oil leaks. I also suspect that the turbo drain hose is something of a ticking time bomb since it starts spraying oil when the pressure gets too high. This job may need to wait, depending on how easy/hard it is to get the transmission out. I’m not going to be able to do anything with the car over this weekend and next weekend is a points event in OVR, so I need to be able to get some testing in with the new transmission before I head up there. If the new oil plumbing has to wait, then so be it!