Ha ha, just kidding. This is the transmission waiting to be installed back into my 3. It just so happens that it was sitting on a huge crack in the concrete floor of my garage.
In all seriousness, the transmission is a surprisingly small component. All of the guts are contained in a small box around eight or ten inches long. The above photograph shows the bellhousing (left side) bolted to the transmission housing (right side), and all the gears sit mostly within that right end.
That said, the thing weighs a damned ton. I'm guessing it's at least 70 pounds, and when it's lying underneath a car that I can barely squirm under, it becomes extremely difficult to maneuver. The red jack you can see in the background ($34.99 from Target, circa 1997) didn't have a large enough lifting platform to balance the transmission...so I bought a new wide-platform jack from Sears earlier. With the body of the transmission well-balanced on the new jack and the very front of the bellhousing tipped up with the front jack (only because the transmission had to be tipped up to mate to the engine, which is tipped downward) I was able to get the whole mess bolted together without too much difficulty. And now that I've hooked the shifter up, it's clear that pretty much everything has gone together correctly.
So, to get this car back together, all I need to install are the:
- remaining pieces of the shifter linkage
- driveshaft
- clutch slave cylinder
- heat shields
- transmission mounts/crossmembers
- entire exhaust system
- intake manifold
- throttle body
- intake piping
- wiring covers
- lower windshield cover
- wiper blades.
Damn, I hate those wiper blades.
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