Need to finish removing the tranny.. the mounts are giving me a problem and not wanting to release the old tranny.

Put the new tranny in with the new clutch.

Mount the cradle back into the car.. hook everything up.

What have I learned from my first time doing this?

it's best to leave all the electrical hooked up and just pull the harness from the ECM through the firewall.

Don't forget to disconnect the heater hoses.

Don't forget to disconnect the power junction box on the passenger side of the engine compartment.

It's better to remove all the "upper" stuff while the car is on the ground cause once it's in the air.. you have to use a ladder to get to it.

When you have the cradle on your dolly.. don't try to jack the car up high enough to pull the engine out from the back (under the trunk), pull it out under the rails through one of the fender wells.. you save yourself a foot of jacking that way.

The coolant makes a friggin mess when you break the lines.

Don't forget to disconnect your gas lines, shifter cables, throttle cable, cruise cable..

When raising the car off of the cradle, make sure your shifter cables don't slid back on to their clips on the tranny.

You don't have to take apart the hubs to get the axles out of the tranny. Mark the position of the control arm adjusters.. then undo the castle nut on the spindle and pop the control arm off.

That will give you enough clearance to remove the axle from the diff (assuming you already have the axle "popped" from the diff)

The one on the left is the old one that came out of the engine... You're looking at the flywheel side of it.. It's worn nearly to the rivits.

As a comparison, you can see the thickness of the old and new disks. As you can (or maybe can't) see, the old disk is worn to the rivits on the pressure plate side. The old pressure plate is deeply channelled and will be discarded and a new one put in it's place.

No more is done tonight, I have to get a new throw out bearing before I bolt the new tranny on.

Side note, the old tranny's bearing forks were so gummed up and stuff, I had to use a rubber mallet to pound on the lever to get the old throw out bearing from the input shaft. When you spind a throw out bearing.. is it supposed to sound like you're rubbing sandpaper over sheet metal?