Frankenstein-ing a New Transmission
As none of us really have a ton of experience rebuilding transmissions, we tapped the expertise of our buddy Darren. He's a mechanic for Honda with at least a decade of transmission rebuilds under his belt. Darren went through all of our parts and gave a yea or nay as to their re-usability. Turns out most of the synchros in the 2nd gen gearbox we had are toast. That's no big deal as we didn't intend to use them anyway. Some of the parts in our original gearbox should not have been re-used, but I used them anyway; it's just too damned expensive to buy new parts for a 30+ year old transmission. Besides, it's our spare.
Van and Darren spent quite a bit of time working on assembling the Miata gearbox while Carl and I worked on other stuff. There was a lot of cursing, a lot of "how's THAT supposed to work?", and a lot of "screw this, I quit". The final nail in the coffin for the day was the fact that we had either misplaced or thrown away a big locking nut that was needed for reassembly. On to the beer drinking...
The following weekend, with missing parts ordered and received (where would we be without the internet and UPS?), we reconvened to (hopefully) finish up this reassembly. Too bad the part that we'd received was not the correct part. So we had to wait for a few more weeks to get the right part...
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