Accomplishing a transmission R&R on a C2 or most C3 Corvettes with a stick is a royal pain in the you know where. To remove the gear box, you have to first remove the driveshaft and shove it out of the way. Then the shifter stick has to come out (and sometimes, the entire shifter). Next you remove the bolts to the bellhousing. The transmission is pulled back, rolled over on its side and then slid back toward the rear end assembly. From here, the distributor should be removed and then you allow the back of the engine to drop on a jack while you point the transmission input shaft in a downward angle. If you’re lucky, the input shaft clears the hole in the bellhousing and the trans can come out without smashing into you. In some cases, the bellhousing bolts have to be loosened to get more room. Grrr….
Here’s the stock setup:
The entire reason for this Gong Show is because automatic transmission Corvettes have a removeable transmission crossmember. Stick shift Corvettes do not. It’s an extremely common issue addressed on various Corvettes forums ad nauseam.
I decided I’m way too old for all of that. Plus I work alone. My Shepherd Teddy won’t help
, so I searched for various options on building a removable crossmember. There are several good options. But in my case, I didn’t want to weld anything on the car. So that limited me to two choices. I copied one that I saw on several different C2 Corvettes. It borrows a bit from a vintage Mopar setup. But it does require a lot of cuts (13 of them in my case).
First things first, I marked out my cuts with a white paint pen. There’s a lot of cell phone camera distortion in both of these photos (the vertical lines are actually at 90-degrees):
There’s not a lot of room under the car, particularly between the frame and the floor pan. I used a compact air saw along with an air powered die grinder and some 3-inch cutting wheels to slice and dice the crossmember. I used up my fair share of saw blades and cut off wheels. It was definitely a long "pucker moment" cutting this thing out....L-O-L:
This is the cut-out piece. I made up some plates out of mild steel to fit:
Since I don’t weld, I took them to town and had them welded to the crossmember:
Next I put it back up in the car and checked the fit. It was extremely tight. I had to use a dead blow hammer to install it and a pry bar to get it back out. Getting it to fit nicely, but still allow it to come out took quite a bit of time. Once it finally fit cleanly, I marked and drilled the eight holes necessary to mount it. Finally, I painted it semi-gloss black:
Here it is in the car. There are four 3/8-inch grade 8 bolts holding in place, plus it’s in double shear so it’s not going anywhere. I’m really (Really!) happy with how it turned out.
