I fabbed and installed a crossmember from some steel L-angle and flat stock for the tranny, turned out to be no big deal. Only took maybe an hour and a half. Then I installed the starter and got to work on the clutch linkage. That linkage WORE ME OUT. The nice engine side pivot bracket for the Z-bar had the bar a little too low and a little to far forward so I cut it and bolted it together with a spacer. No so pretty now but the Z-bar is in the right place and it's still plenty solid...
Unfortunately this made my Z-bar too far out of line to work with the standard pushrod to the clutch fork. If I had put it in there it would have been at about a 45 degree angle pushing the fork down and toward the car center line instead of pushing it straight back. After checking the throws carefully against my rigging tool, I decided the throws were all right on the money and I built a Y-link to tie the Z-bar and fork together. The Y setup has a rod that pulls on the fork and slides back and forth through the tranny crossmember, and another rod tied to it that the Z-bar pushes on. The fork side link has a big C-clamp like feature the holds a threaded bullet for clutch fork depression and the main rod screws all the way through to rest very close to the back side of the fork. Because of the back side rod, the bullet can't fall out of the fork and I can also use a spring anywhere on the Y-rod to maintain throwout bearing to pressure place clearance when not pushing the clutch pedal. Sounds simple, right? Too bad it too me most of the whole day to invent and build that one! Lots or trips under the car, back out, back under etc. It came out nice though and the clutch pedal feels great.
I don't know if you can see how this is all set up but here are some pics of the Y-link setup.
Need a couple jam nuts on here. You can see the end of the clutch fork sticking through the C-clamp and the piece at the bottom of the picture. Also you can't really see it because of the light but the threaded rod is up against the back of the fork here.
Bar slides through the crossmember. Not very elegant but it seems to work smooth and quiet. This is really just an alignment feature, there's no real vertical or sideways pressure on the rod. The nut between the two rods here is also a jam nut. The screw that ties the rods together threads through the longer rod. Looks kind of funny but it's solid. Remember there's only a couple hundred pounds of pressure on that screw and the rods just move a tiny bit against each other. Almost nothing.
Also I did manage to put the new driveshaft in place but the old yoke takes a smaller U-joint than the one on the driveshaft. The new chunk has the right yoke and since the driveshaft was balanced with the large u-joint installed I don't want to take it out. The new rear chunk has to go in today. Also I hope to replace the speedo cable with the new cable and adapter, hook up the exhaust and work out the details of the E-brake cable system. It won't be complete, but I should at least be able to take a test-drive today.
