As I suspected, things were going a little to smoothly..... While I was doing some prep work for the headers today I gave the flex-plate a little look over and felt for the clearance on the bell housing and Sha Zam ! its touching and at certain points of the rotation by hand it will grind .... When we were bolting everything up it was fine and went through several hand crank rotations..... then everything was tightened down and the motor mounts torqued down...... Is this a normal clearance thing ? What should I have done differently ? What now ? loosen everything up and hope it realigns ? Excuse the sarcasm, im slightly pissed off......

 

The flexplate attaches to the converter with 4 lock nuts that should not be reused.

If the nuts are reused, the plate can work loose, wobble on the converter.

 

I'm now thinking we may have bent the footplate having to lift the motor a bit to deal with the motor mounts while it was attached to the tranny..... I hope thats not true, but there aren't alot of explanations for what is occurring.....

 

Sounda like you didn,t get the torque installed all the way into the tranny.

 

Did you install the spacer plate between the flywheel and engine?

 

Yes, the spacer plate is in there all lined up with the dowels etc..... everything fit like a champ, until we did the final toque down..... Will start loosing everything up this afternoon, see what the deal is........ Well at least I hadn't put on those headers yet....

 

Got everything loosened up, tranny bolts out, starter out, motor mount nuts off .... And its NOT touching the bell housing, but with a feel of my small pry bar it dose not have much clearance, does anyone know how much clearance is spec for the flex plate at the bottom of the bell housing? I have a feeling that If i bolted everything back up, it will be touching again....

 

If you had the engine separated from the trans make certain that the torque converter is all the way back in the trans, this could cause your problem and create many more if not installed properly

 

what I said.

 

Well I got the engine loose from the torque converter with a gentle lift on the Cherry Picker and instantly heard a settling noise....... Got under the truck and the torque converter was much more comfortable then before with added movement within the bolt holes in the flex plate and I got that "clang clang" that you want to hear indicating its free floating. I have a few different theories on why the motor was bound up.... We didn't pay much attention to the order in torquing things down when doing motor mounts, tranny bolts and torque converter..... I also had a T-handle valve cover bolt that was jammed up against the master cylinder, although you really couldn't tell until everything was secured..... Either way no rubbing now, everything cycles smoothly and I got new torque converter nuts like NumberDummy suggested........ Starter is back in (PITA) and headers are almost on, naturally I now have a header bolt hole that is not keeping the bolt tight, shes worn out .......... always something......