Short trips and medium weight loads are what we want to be prepared for. I also want this truck to be friendly for the girl to drive. I do not want her to have think about shifting and working the clutch if she needs to drive this truck. We have some steep sections on the driveway and hills in town.
Being behind the wheel of a large vehicle will give her enough to think about without mixing in shifting.
This truck’s main use will be for moving large objects, soil, gravel ans possibly firewood collection for our homestead.
Delivery charges from our local hardware store are very affordable but dump trucks fron the local sand and gravel guys are very expensive. Another high expense is getting a tow truck to move things when required.
My only other truck is an old 94′ Ford 3/4 ton which has had a hard life and is not really setup for what I need it to do at this point in my life.
I am a car and bike guy and never dealt with a project on something this big before. The exception to that statement would be that I did work in a heavy duty brake shop for a good chunk of time when I was a kid.
Researching the whole automatic tranny for this project did not yield too many returns. People talked about using TH 400’s in them which I was not too interested in. I wanted industrial strength and not just tough. My research led me to an original sales brochure which mentioned an Allison 540 as an option.
With that in mind I started looking for one and did not find too many readily available out there. I knew there would be a good list of items required for this swap including. …..
- Flywheel
- Bellhousing Adapter
- Torque Converter
- Starter
- Trans
- Radiator
- Shifter
- Park Brake Drum {mounted at tailshaft of the transmission}
- Park Brake Controller
- Crossmember
- Driveshaft
I found an AT 540 at a truck wrecker close to where I work and arranged to go pick it up.
Upon arrival I was asked “why do you want a 540?”
My response was “that’s was the original optional auto transmission, so I thought it made sense”.
I then got school’d on these units by a really helpful guy who knew way more than I did about them.
We drove out to their boneyard in search of a school bus which was supposed to have a good Allison 545 in it. Sure enough, there it was, rad looked good (maybe not the right size though). It had a horrible ugly shifter which would have looked stupid in the truck as well.
As we were diving away from the bus, an early 90’s truck caught the yard guys attention and he said “I forgot about this one, it’s not in our inventory list”.
We drove over to a C 60 snd saw it was mechanically complete with a small block engine, nice shifter setup, rad, cooling lines and no electronics attached to anything on the trans.
What really caught my attention was the picker boom that was bent at a 30 degree angle and had caved in the whole roof of the truck.
I said to him as I looked up at the picker “I like the looks of this”. His response was “that thing is done, it’s only good for parts now”.
But what I liked about the destroyed picker was that it appeared the truck was working when somebody rolled it over and put the whole unit out of service. Mechanically speaking, the tranny was last being used in a working truck.
How bad could it be? It turned out to be bad, the bellhousing on it was cracked. But all of the other parts were taken off this truck and another 545 Tranny was sourced to go into my pile of parts. Maybe I can install it and use the truck for awhile before this trans need a rebuild.
The whole truck is going to be restored eventually, rebuilding the tranny will eventually be part for the course anyway.
I got a very decent price thrown at me for all the parts I needed and was only asked that in return I bring back all the parts I am not going to use. No problem there, they won’t do me any good sitting around wasting space for the amount of time it will take to get rid of them for next to no money.
I now have almost every part needed to start this transmission swap, I guess it’s time to yank the old engine and tranny.