Lots of progress, but also a couple of day-long diversions for things that you wouldn't normally think would be a big deal...

Things are moving right along, although never quite as quickly as you think they would. I got the motor back together, and got the 5 speed transmission mated to it, and figured "Well, I'll just pop this right back in there...". Not quite.

I put the wheels on, pulled the car off the stands, and rolled it outside so I could get the motor on the hoist and line up the car for re-insertion. (These are the ups and downs of having a small garage.) While doing this, I noticed a drop of water on the heater valve, which is bolted to the firewall at the back of the engine bay, and that gets pretty much buried once the motor is in there. Water is supposed to be on the inside of this, not the outside, and while you may say "Big deal, the heater won't work--you're travelling during the summer, it's not like you're going to freeze to death", a leak also means that a good portion of your engine coolant can end up on the ground, and that's never a good thing. So, on further investigation, I found that all the O-rings in the valve were toast, which was allowing a small leak now that could become a large leak later. 

On the plus side, almost everything on the car (including this valve) is rebuildable to a large extent. On the minus side, this meant that I spent most of the rest of the day driving around to Vegas hardware stores in search of O-rings that were the right size (as usual, McFadden-Dale had the right stuff). While this could have made for one of those great "Man's Life" stories like "Stranded in the Desert With Killer Gila Monsters Because of a $0.14 Part!!", I decided not to manufacture drama like that and I sprung for the fourteen cents and fixed it. 

With that little issue taken care of, I moved back to getting the motor and transmission back in the car, and was again briefly de-railed by a minor part. The speedometer drive on the 5 speed transmission is in a different spot than it is on the four speed. Apparently, this causes some 'interference' with the inside of the transmission tunnel, with the right angle adapter and the cable running into the inside wall and preventing one from actually installing the transmission. We're talking like 1/8" or so of interference. So, out comes the motor and transmission again, and I spend some quality time introducing my transmission tunnel to a strategically placed slide hammer to give the speedo cable a little breathing room, and then we're ready to go again. Once all that interference is taken care of, everything goes in quite nicely. The custom bracket that got made for the 5 speed fit perfectly, and all the measurements I made for getting the transmission in lined up with the new plate and the re-located hole for the shifter, all of which were good things, as the fix there wouldn't have been $0.14 if I got it wrong. 

Now with the motor back in and the new transmission apparently fitting correctly, it's time to make it run again and to finish painting that new 5 speed trim plate. As a side project, I tried finding a space saver spare to free up some trunk room, and it only half worked; it fit on the rear, but was too small for the hubs on the front. The search continues...