Transmission Mount
While Steve was welding on my frame I was grinding off the heads of rivets and drilling them out to remove the original X-member and transmission mount. I did the top and side rivets while the frame was upright, I saved the bottom ones until I turned the frame over. Once the frame was flipped and welding finished on the boxing plates I returned to center part of the frame.
The rear part of this tunnel unbolts and was knocked out through the rear and pretty easy to remove. The remaining three parts did not want to come apart. A few good hits with a hammer and long chisel got it to slide forward, then pulled out of the frame in one piece. I've heard that this could be done with the body on the frame, I don't think I would want to do it that way.
Once it was all removed it was time to install the new Chassis Engineering X-member tunnel kit. My kit has the wishbone splitting kit and mounting pad for a GM transmission.
This three piece kit is a bolt in kit, it bolts to your frame after a few adjustments are made. The first piece to in place is the brace joining the two inner frame rails. I needed to spread my frame rails slightly apart to get this piece in. This was easily done by wedging a length of 2x4 in between the frame rails. I then lined up the two bottom holes, these were actually pretty close. I lined up the four side bolt holes, two each side, as best I could. You could see partial holes but not anything you could drop a bolt in. I then laid the bottom plate on the frame lining up the rear three holes.
The directions say that the holes should line up on 37-40 frames, 35-36 frames would not. They didn't line up on my 37 frame, but since this is a pickup and has more in common with the 35-36 than a 1938 pickup it doesn't surprise me. To be honest this is what I expected anyway, to assume every frame is identical would be dumb. At this point the rear holes are lined up, everything clamped down. I then run a drill through the two plates and frame on the outer rear holes to clean up the slight misalignment. Then using the new parts as a template I drilled new holes in the frame for the remaining bolt holes. With the plate bolted down I sprayed a little paint into the wishbone mounting holes and scribed a circle for drilling. I then drilled out the holes with the largest drill bit I had handy and finished up with a die grinder. With that finished the lower plate was reinstalled and the new ends for the wishbones test fitted.
At this point the wishbone was split since everything was handy and easy to get to for measurements.
With the wishbone split and boxing plate welds ground down the frame was returned to its upright position it was time to install the top hat. I started the hat the same as the bottom plate, by aligning the rear holes. These didn't really line up very well and when I checked the center brace I noticed that hole location would have been in a bad place with no way to get a nut on a bolt dropped in this hole. If I would have noticed this before I probably could have made some adjustments to the center brace. Since nothing is mounted to this plate I decided to slide it rearward. When I did this I noticed the front two holes lined up perfectly and the rear holes are now centered in the middle brace. This did move my rear outer holes back on the new rectangular outer braces but not enough to cause any problems.
This was a straight forward and easy kit to install, the hardest part is removing the stock parts. Next up, splitting the wishbone.
