I got the engine and transmission in a while ago. I will need to pull them out again at some point to do some finishing work on the frame cross members that I had to pretty seriously hack, but other than that, this part is done.
The shifter comes out in a good spot. That is largely the reason that I chose this transmission. Most put the shifter way back on the tail section of the transmission, which would be under my seat. I will probably need to do some fiddling with the shifter handle to get it angled a little better, but this isnt bad.
The shifter itself (the tower at the bottom of the stick) is from Core Shifters, which specializes in short throw shifters for manual transmissions. It's a pretty nice unit.
I started about 2 months ago on the rear end. The old torque tube rear end just isnt compatible with a modern drive train. The part I am swapping in is from a 69 Firebird. It just happened to be the right width to fit well. (The 12 bolt from the old Camaro would have been even better, but those are now $$$). I had wanted to find a more modern rear end that would have disk brakes and anti-lock sensors, but few cars have solid rear ends anymore, and the ones that do are way too wide.
I got it pretty cheap from a guy who had pulled it out of a 55 Chevy, and didnt know what it was originally from. I cleaned 40 years of crud out of the casing, lots of chewed up metal in there. It had obviously ground up at least one set of gears previously, and no one had bothered to clean out the mess! I replaced one bad bearing, and all the seals, and re-set the gears. We will see how it works out.
The old truck looks kind of funny with nothing under the rear.
That is one heavy duty rear bumper. It is all made from 1/4 inch steel, and I'll bet the bumper weighs 200 lbs by itself. I dont think this is a Chevrolet bumper, and it may even be hand made. It easily holds up the whole truck.
I bought a "universal" leaf spring kit to mount the read end. It is a fairly straight forward thing to set up, but the new springs lower the truck quite a bit (for that hot-rod look). I didnt like it, and I spend a lot of time building a much taller leaf spring mount, to raise it up a couple inches.
After fitting these new spring mounts in place, I measured an increase in fender height of about 1-5/8 inches from the original mounts that came with the kit. Overall, this is a drop of 7/8 inch from the stock '41 springs, with about another 1 inch of drop expected as the springs settle. I can live with that.
This is a wheel from my old Camaro, which makes it look kind of hotrod-ish, but this is temporary. It is nice to finally have it off of the jack stands.
There are countless little details in finishing this up. Brake components, drive shaft, etc. But at least I can roll it around now.
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