disassembly and reassembly
I had a very generous grandfather. I had another one too, but it was the very generous one who sent us all those grade-appropriate American school books a year or two before they were appropriate while we were in Brasil. funny, I never thought about how odd it was for me to survive childhood speaking Portuguese and reading English. but I did. and then we came to this country - or as I usually say, we were dumped here -and I read in the same language that I tried to learn how to speak. but I have gotten off-topic. please forgive me. my very generous grandfather also kept me supplied with things that almost worked. that is, they were slightly broken. he trusted my curiosity to figure out what "worked" was supposed to look like, then to take the item apart, fix it, and put it back together again. I don't know that he did that on purpose, but I think he did. in any case, I grew up taking things apart and putting them back together. not just things my grandfather sent me - which would have been fine if they never worked again - but things around the house that interested me and I could scurry off with. I lucked out. I never took something apart that I couldn't put back together again. so I learned how things worked! when we got back to this country and my bicycle broke, I knew how to take the bicycle apart, fix it, and put it back together, except I didn't have the part that needed replacing. when I got a job that paid me real money - my paper route - that problem was solved. when I got to college and bought a car and didn't like the damned Hydramatic transmission it had, I was again lucky. I told a friend what I was about to do, and he told me I was about to kill myself. oh. so, following his instructions, I put the car up on concrete blocks, way up, so I had room enough to crawl around under it, that kind of up. I also followed his instructions and put the concrete blocks crosswise to the way I'd've put them, so they gave me side to side support as well as height support. that way, when someone walked up and leaned on the car while I worked on it - and of course someone would, the whole thing didn't come crashing down and turn me into a pudding. then, still following instructions - can you believe it? an eighteen-year-old boy following instructions? - I rented the kind of jack that cradled the Hydramatic transmission, took the weight of it off the bolts that connected it to the engine, broke them free and unscrewed them, disconnected the engine from the driveshaft, and let the transmission down far enough that I could roll it out from under the car. when I started that project, I had no idea what all was involved. but the idea of it was simple: remove the damned Hydramatic transmission and replace it with a standard transmission. it's just that the doing of it was so much more complicated than anything I'd done before because of the size and weight of the transmission. oh, and for the same reason, the doing of it offered so many more ways to kill me. I'd never before taken apart anything that could fight back. the standard transmission was so much smaller and lighter that I would have thought I didn't need the jack any more, but my friend convinced me that I didn't have enough hands to hold the transmission in place while I attached it to...wait! where the hell was the clutch assembly? Well, no one had mentioned a clutch assembly before, but now that he did, it made sense. I had to have a clutch in order to shift gears, right? which meant I had to install a clutch pedal. which meant I had to replace the brake pedal that accompanied the Hydramatic transmission with a real brake pedal. sigh. how had my simple "replace" project gotten so complicated? nevermind. it had. so I replaced the Hydramatic's brake pedal with a different brake pedal and added a clutch pedal, and made all the connections for the brakes to still work. I attached the clutch assembly to the standard transmission, and made sure they were tight enough to hold the transmission in place, even when it was traveling at sixty miles an hour or so. then I attached the two assemblies (clutch and transmission ) to the engine, and learned the rest of what I had to do. sigh. I replaced the driveshaft that worked for the Hydramatic with the driveshaft that worked with the standard. fortunately I was able to find and buy an axle-and-differential assembly for the standard transmission to replace the axle-and-transmission assembly for the Hydramatic. and I thought I hated that Hydramatic transmission before I started to replace it! but I finally had the car mechanically reassembled. I had the car towed to a mechanic to get all the lubrication and fluids replaced. he asked me what in the hell I had done, then just about died laughing as I told him. he lubed the car in half a dozen different ways, and I drove it away, and drove it for about three years. my boss at the time bought the car so his daughter could drive it to school, and it worked for her til she decided she really needed a modern car. I never heard about it after that. but that wasn't the end of my disassembling and reassembling, just the climax. damn, I learned a lot through the years, disassembling and reassembling! and, given that I worked with engineers for most of my career, it was a good thing. back in those days. and yes I still grin, smile, or laugh about what I had to learn, and how, during a lifetime of disassembling and reassembling. thank you, Granddaddy.
No comments:
Post a Comment