Here's the shift lever bracket after more modification. It's not super clear in the image, but I slotted the far hole towards the back, and the near hole to the right, and then enlarged the clearance cut. This allows me a fair amount of adjustment left and right, but took off rather a lot of metal, but it's bolted down flat to the plate under it, this should be fine. To get things lines up right, I put the transmission in 5th (or 6th) gear, then lined up the bracket so that the cable was all the way in. I can now shift into all gears, woo!
With that done, I shifted the car into 6th gear, and turned the crank by hand. I wanted to see the wheel hubs turning, proving that I have the splines mated. This test passed, so probably everything is ok. Since I'm pretty sure now I'm not going to have to take the transmission out of the car, I filled it with gear oil. At first, I did this from the bottom into t he side fill hole. Then the tube adapter came off the top of the bottle, and I ended up lubricating myself instead of the transmission. After that I wisened up, and used the fill hole at the top of the transmission, since I assume that's what it's for. That worked much better.
At this point, the goal is to get the car started. Which means I need to get the starter installed. This caused me more trouble than expected. The first issue is that none of the bolts I took off the previous transmission were the right length for the lower starter mount. The long one there is too long and bottoms out on the hole. The longer of the two short ones has about 1/2 thread grabbed, and the shiny one is the longest McMaster M10 bolt I stock (clearly I need to get some longer ones). I eventually found a replacement in my old bolts drawer, which is good cause I really didn't want to brave going to the hardware store and finding out that the M10 bolts that they have which are the right length are the wrong thread pitch.
The next issue was a little more of a pain. The top mount comes in from the other side, so the hole on the starter is threaded. But, it appears that this threaded hole is a little buggered. If you don't get the bolt in just right, it'll cross thread and screw in pretty freely for around 3 turns, then jam. Getting this one on took me quite a while, but I did eventually get it on.
Here's a photo of the starter in place. I hear that on the stock AW11 motor (which I've never worked with) fitment of the starter here is tight. On this later model, there's not clearance problem at all. Getting to the starter here is actually pretty easy.
And here's the problem bolt in question. It's the one directly above the shiny McMaster bolt in this picture. Just to the left of it is one of the upper mounting bolts. And farther to the left is the upper mounting bolt that I didn't put on yet, I really should get around to doing that. That McMaster bolt is my primary grounding point in this car. The big fat wire goes into the trunk where the battery is, and the thin grounding strap connects to the chassis.
Next up is bleeding the clutch, but before that I needed to find the clip that holds the clutch hydraulic line in place. The one in the picture below, similar to the clips that hold brake lines in place. I had smartly placed it somewhere while disassembling the slave cylinder bracketry for cleaning and what not. I was pretty sure that somewhere was in the trash, but after going through the trash piece by metal shaving and oil covered piece, it wasn't in there. It turns out it was sitting on my work bench in front of my face the whole time, just on the other side of the workbench, where I looked for it 10 or 15 times but somehow didn't see it.
Otherwise clutch bleeding went without any trouble. The new bleed location is pretty slick and makes bleeding the clutch much easier, but I still needed my wife to hit the clutch pedal for me. She only grumbled a little bit.
The final step before starting was to install the battery again. It had gone mostly flat over the winter, and so had been sitting on a trickle charger for the last month or so. For anyone interested, here's the battery and bracket in the trunk. Don't look too carefully at that bracket, it was on of my first tig welding projects and absolutely my first aluminum welding project. The welds are strong enough for purpose. With the battery in this location, I was able to use the stock positive battery lead without modification.
Anyway, the car started no problem, which is a good feeling. The bad news is that the throwout bearing is making some pretty awful noise. This bearing (and the related fork) are different sizes in the C50 (stock AW11) and C160 (new 6 speed) transmissions. So, I used the one in the C160. In hind sight, that transmission was sitting neglected in someone's backyard for a few years, so maybe it's not too surprising that it's not in like new condition. Seems like there's a good chance there's a new clutch and throwout bearing in my future, which I can't say I'm looking forward to.
The exhaust is still not on the car, so I didn't try actually moving anywhere or even putting it into gear. I'll do that today after I finish tightening up all those little things that I haven't tightened yet, like that last upper transmission bolt, I probably need that.