Project: BLACK METAL - '67 Camaro

[67rally]

Alright, it's been a while since I've updated. I was just driving and enjoying the car, not trying to work on it much this summer. I made a trip up to NH to the Cars 'n Coffee @ Classic Car Blasting and met up with a bunch of guys from Team Camaro. Had a lot of fun, and cruised over to the coast with Phil, Scott and significant others for some lunch.

After lunch, I noticed that reverse was very hard to get into, and some of the shifts felt a little notchy. I tried bleeding the MC, and it didn't help. I flushed the clutch fluid and re-bled and it stayed the same. After a lot of googling, everything pointed towards my slave cylinder. Added to this, I was concerned that my clutch disc had gotten contaminated from the oil getting pushed out of my valve covers and valley cover before I added the PCV system. More googling, there was a concern that I might have blown the rear main seal from all the crank case pressure. And lastly, I was getting a little trans fluid that was escaping past the tailhousing seal. I thought the fluid level might have gotten low enough to affect the shifts, but the level was right up to the top.

Not wanting to wait for parts once I got everything apart, I ordered a new rear cover that has the rear main seal already pressed in (also came with a rear cover gasket and new bolts along with the white plastic alignment tool insert), all for less than $50. A rear main seal itself was around $35, so worth it to me.

This job would have been so much easier with a lift. Instead I did it on jack stands on a downward sloping driveway with a trans jack. Even with 6 ton jack stands, I couldn't get the car high enough to get the trans out from under the car. And at 140lbs, I didn't want to wrestle it off the trans jack and then get it back on. All tolled, this probably took two full days to complete.