Green Monster Guts

Seeing my project truck, the Chevy, is green I figured I should get it running for St Patty's Day.

I finally got the troublesome cross-member out. Murphy wasn't very impressed at all and wished I'd play with him instead. I need to train him to fetch tools for me. Anyways, you can see the big cross-member sitting next to the yellow ramp. I'm taking it to the car wash first thing tomorrow to get power washed as it's got at least a centimeter of road grime on it from years of neglect. It's been blocking 3 of the bolts that are required to get off the transmission fluid pan so it had to be removed if I was going to drain the tranny fluid from the pan. It's a huge pain in the ass I can see why it hadn't been done in a while, and I won't be doing it anytime again soon.

It's a great feeling to get it all pulled apart and cleaned up. The fluid that drained out was a mess too, way past it's prime so I'm swapping for some fluid from this decade. It was brown and with metal sludge everywhere, clearly showing some use and abuse of this 32 year old Chevy 350T tranny. Check out the before and after I cleaned out the pan shots. Look at all that sludge in the pan! By the way, that square thing is the actual filter that bolts to the middle of the pan area. See how the pan is gray with metal particulates? It's supposed to be red fluid. Let this be a warning! Change your transmission fluid (every 50K or so). I'm excited to put the new fluid in and test drive the Green Monster and see what the new fluid feels like when she drives.

Just in case you're curious what the inside of an automatic transmission looks like (something tells me nobody here is) here's a pic of the inner workings, the stuff that gets lubricated by the tranny fluid. Pretty neat eh?

So that's the big hump. I'm over the hard part. Now all I do is be sure to put in the exact amount of tranny fluid tomorrow and it's good. Sure there's a lot of fluid still left in the transfer case, but with out a pump I'm not about to get to it. This should stop the leak (my original reason for doing this) and give her a little bit more grip when she shifts.