Читать книгу GM Turbo 350 Transmissions - Cliff Ruggles - Страница 6

PREFACE

Having been a dedicated muscle car enthusiast now for the better part of my adult life, I can say with no exaggeration whatsoever that there are few things more enjoyable that being able to work on your own car or truck and get perfect results from your efforts. To this day, I have never understood why hobbyists farm out many of the components of their cars to others instead of rebuilding them in their own shops or garages. Transmissions, in particular, are at the top of the list for the items that get farmed out. There has always been a mystique about transmissions that makes even the most skilled automotive technicians avoid them like the plague! They also get hit with some pretty hefty bills from not doing them at home.

Similar to most other things associated with this hobby, you can get results that are just as good, or better, and save money by doing it yourself. The key component here is information, followed closely by motivation. This book was designed for the hobbyist.

It was a Saturday afternoon in early fall 1978 in the small garage detached from the house we lived in at that time. Without any outside assistance I had decided to tackle a TH350 transmission rebuild. Not that I really wanted to do it; I would rather have gone hunting or someplace with my friends. I still chuckle every time I lift the valve body off of a transmission, and think back to the six check balls that were rolling across the concrete floor in my garage. I had removed the valve body and turned the unit over to allow the fluid to drain out. At that moment I was really thinking that I should have carried it to a shop, but my income level at that time just didn’t have any room in it for a high-performance muscle car that wasn’t moving because I had fried its transmission.

I managed to find five of the six check balls, and after careful observation could see the “tracks” in the case where they were supposed to be. The story has a good ending; although that particular rebuild took me several weeks, and I wasn’t at all confident that the car was going to move under its own power when I lowered it to the ground for a test drive!

Over three decades and hundreds of units later, I’m armed with quite a bit more knowledge, and a toolbox full of homemade tools dedicated strictly to transmission work. I don’t give a second thought to stripping any automatic transmission down to a bare case, then putting it back together with my large assortment of hand-crafted custom tools and self-learned special procedures.

I set two goals for this book: to provide the information I’ve learned over many years to others and to present that information in a way that puts this task well within reach of the average enthusiast. Basically, I wanted to make the information available and also keep it simple and easy to understand. In addition, I want to show you that you really can do the work at home, by yourself, and make a lot of what you need to accomplish the task from common hand tools, or other items typically found in most home garages.