Input Shaft

I was a little leary about tackling the swapping of the input shaft, the shaft that transfers the power from the engine to the transmission, but I called Eric Langbein and he gave me some great instructions.  The first thing I did was remove the clutch slave cylinder which is pictured below.

All I had to do to remove that was to disconnect the lines -- much easier than I thought!  The next task as to separate the gear box from the bell housing. 

High Temp RTV silicone was used in between the transmission and the bell housing so I knew that separating them was going to be a little difficult.  After I got all the 8 nuts off, I had my wife, Terry, hold the chassis while I pulled on the gear box and hit it with a rubber hammer.  That didn't do much so I ended up getting a pry bar and putting it between a couple of choice spots where I could get some leverage.  That broke the seal and I was then able to pull the gear box away from the bell housing. 

Unfortunately, one thing that I noticed is that there was gear lube at the point where the shaft was coming out of the gear box and I didn't have another seal so after talking to Eric it was decided that Eric would change the seal and I didn't need to bother with putting in the input shaft provided by HPD.  However, I went ahead and removed the old shaft.

All I had to do was remove 4 bolts and then I removed 1 spring clip to slip the bearing and seal off of the shaft.  Removing all the silicone took a lot longer!!



The next thing that I tried to do was to install the HPD provided clutch slave cylinder.

However, I ran into problems because the first bolt that I tried to screw in stripped the threads in the bell housing.  I hate it when that happens!!  It isn't tough to fix but I unfortunately didn't have the right size helicoil so I left this task for Eric as well.  The good news is that this morning I took the car to Eric's shop this morning so that he can modify the chassis to accept the Honda Fit engine.  Big changes are coming!!