Slow, Driving Rustoration 1972 Dart
Ok, so two weeks later, I bought the 904 from Oklahoma. It looked like it had been sitting outside for awhile. It's the one in this post:
Slow, Driving Rustoration 1972 Dart It's a 1970 model and I ordered a Torque Converter and a rebuild kit, actually just using the rubber seals and gaskets.
Tonight with my girlfriend out of town till Sunday, I put a piece of plywood on the dining room table and brought the patient in. First I tipped it tail down to drain any fluid out. It had about 2 cups of trans fluid and a cup of water. They weren't mixed but I was still expecting the worst when I started taking it apart. I've never worked on an automatic transmission before but I had the Tom Hand book and watched a few youtube videos.
I don't want to sound overly confident, but that was so easy. It is so well put together. I had it completely disassembled in about and hour and another hour and a half cleaning and inspecting. I was really worried what I would find inside after seeing that water pour out but I was pleasantly surprised. First of all no crap in the pan at all, and nothing but a very fine bit of surface rust on the "sun shell?".
Everything else inside looks like it was protected by a nice little layer of tranny fluid. The bands look fine and no burn marks. I'm glad I took it apart to look because I had to know if it was a hunk of rust inside but I think I could have definitely just installed it as it was. I'm not going to be asking it to do much. I hope it work out for quite awhile, but if it doesn't, I plan on doing a complete rebuild on the original trans. So if this one breaks down in 1000 miles I'll have one ready to stab back in it.
I'll post pictures in case anyone sees something I missed. I'm hoping to get it cleaned up and put back together tomorrow.