[Chop Top Ford]

After driving it around for a month, winter was approaching fast and I started to have some problems. The Transmission was pissing fluid everywhere and my harmonic balancer started coming apart and nicking at the timing cover.

Since we get a decent winter here in Kansas City I wanted to use the down time of the season to get other issues taken care of that were noticed during initial repairs. This was when I swapped over to the 700R4 since the case on the TH400 was broken due to improper installation from the previous owner. We also used this time to put new seals in the 350 to stop some of the leaks it had. The motor was also resting on the original inline 6 motor mount and it had the motor too far back causing the transmission bell housing to rub the fire wall ever so slightly under heavy acceleration. Since the transmissions were different lengths and the new CPP motor mounts moved the motor forward where it belonged, I had to have my drive shaft re-cut... again. This also made my new exhaust piping come up short. I found this a good time to get rid of the factory exhaust manifolds and throw on a set of Flowtech ceramic coated headers so when I had the pipes extended the would mate up with the new headers. I also dressed up the motor a bit and we did a lot of rewiring under the hood as well s getting the heater functional.

Again only working on weekends we spent about 2 months getting the work done you will see in the next series of photos.