Will this ever end?

Marco my itinerant mechanic failed to show on Saturday. The old boys were all sure that it was because I docked his wages after the crankshaft oil seal debacle. Well life can be cruel can't it? Replacing the oil seal was no problem to a man of my calibre (even though the engine which used to be upside down on a cradle was now swinging from an engine hoist) what was going to be an issue was getting the beast back in the car. Gene has all the knowledge but at 82 years old he can no longer tuck a 390 under his arm and lift it into the engine bay. I had just decided to split the transmission off when Red Weaver turned up. With the two of us on the hoist we were able to get the entire lump in although for some reason we struggled forever to get the engine mounts and brackets aligned. Just as the engine fell into place Gene and my invisible mechanic turned up, so I set Marco on to connecting the transmission mounts whilst I took Gene off for breakfast at the local greasy spoon. When we returned Marco had completely finished underneath including the drives shaft and the emergency brake as well as all the overdrive bits. Hats off to Marco who is so skinny that he doesn't need to jack up the car. (Unlike me as you will see later)

So cutting a long story short we got ready to fire her up and we did. Sadly the only thing that didn't work was the oil pressure lamp and in short order we realized that the oil pump was not working. Thanks to Marco's prior knowledge on this stuff we soon realised that when I had replaced the oil pump I had misaligned the drive shaft and instead of threading it into the distributor I had threaded it into free space. Anticipating removing the engine once again I went off for a manly cry just as Red returned. Red turned out to be my guardian angel that day because he knew that if we removed the distributor and reached in with a very long set of medical tweezers we could extract the dive shaft and re-route it. In my defence, let me say that this is an appalling piece of design (not that there is any excuse for being a cry baby).

So with the pump fixed we tuned the engine and got her sounding good which was my cue to call it a day. Then we discovered that not only was there no reverse gear but the car would not even roll backward. After two hours of not fixing the transmission I put a jack under the differential and dragged it out in reverse so I could drive it into the Galaxie garage. Talk about two steps forward and one back. Now where is my little hanky.

Post script

That night Gene phoned his buddy Ed Macky in New York. Ed said without hesitation that I had not installed the overdrive solenoid properly and if I pulled it out, twisted it pushed it in and then aligned the boltholes I would be fixed. So with a heavy heart I jacked it up 3 feet to accommodate my lardy old arse and got to it. Guess what? Ed is a God amongst mechanics.