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9/09/20: Over the past week I have been trying to tie up some loose ends in preparation of reinstalling the engine.

The block is still at the machine shop. The owner, a week after accepting the block, got a “Killer” deal on a crank grinder that was to be installed last week. He said because one journal only needed to be ground an additional three thousands, it would be best to do it on the new grinder. I agreed and now I’m hoping to hear about it soon.

I finally received all of the parts I needed, rebuild the transmission and gave it a nice coat of satin black ready to reinstall when the engine goes in. I replaced the input and main shaft bearings, the tail shaft bearing and retainer, tail shaft universal yoke, one of the shifting forks as well as all of the gaskets and seals. I follow a YouTube video (by jayhawker) to rebuild it and it made it easy. The tail of the tranny was slightly different but everything else was spot on. It feels so much smoother and sounds so much better, I totally expect it to silence the transmission noise I had when the clutch was out and the tranny was in neutral. I’m also hoping that some of the transmission whine is gone.

I also wanted to relocate the horn relay, the headlight relays to better locations and accomplished that task. I also relocated the ballast resister to get it off of the coil it was previously mounted to.

I’ve been wanting to fix a leaky drivers side axle seal that I discovered in the spring of 2019, that leaked all over the brake shoes. During that time, I was wintering in South Carolina and didn’t have the tools to accomplish pulling the axles, so I cleaned up the shoes, reinstalled them until I got back to NY. Since, I have been repairing higher priority stuff and was not able to get to the brakes. Since I’m still waiting on the engine, I pulled the rear drums, brakes, axles and the axle bearings and seals. I didn’t expect any issues as the axles didn’t have any slop. I was surprised to find both axles had corrosion on where the bearings ride and on the seal area necessitating replacement.

Now to find the axles.