Good morning,
Still working on the welding with my son. The stitching isn't going as well or as easy as we thought. Need more practice, I guess. We burned through a few spots (yep, a little too long holding the gun, mainly me) or just welded on the surface (mainly my son not holding long enough). But, we are okay; having a few laughs at our mistakes is good for both of us. We figure that by the time we get through with this, we might be able to tackle taking off a radiator support from our alternative parts store (the JY) and weld it on the car.
We also finally ended up replacing the transmission fluid. Should have been an easy thing, but seems that the previous owner had removed the catalytic converters and welded on connectors that made it difficult to remove the pan (not sure how, because it should have given us more room without the cats, I thought). Anyway, when we finally got the pan off, that there was transmission bolt in there that had come undone (the middle one, toward the rear). Ended up putting it back in and checking the torque on the other bolts while we down there.
We got to talking about replacing the automatic with a manual. Not something that we are likely to do right away, given we haven't seen any at the JY (usually pulled out by the time we see them). Wondering what other cars/years we could be looking at from which to grab a transmission. We've seen threads referencing a T-5 and other Ford transmission types, but given we hadn't thought much about this before, we weren't paying too much attention. Thoughts?
Thanks again. jhp and son.