My plan for the weekend was to install the new transmission in the car. I succeeded!
Lifting it up there was tough. The tunnel in the 190E is TINY. There's not a lot of room to move! Since the input shaft extends further than the transmission mounting surface, you have no choice to lift the transmission and move it forward after the shaft clears the clutch's fingers. Only thing is that the tunnel is so narrow that my cool custom clutch line was in the way. I had to remove the bracket and move it out of the way. But that didn't give me all the clearance I needed. In the end, I had to jack the front of the engine a couple of inches to pivot it down like 10-15 degrees. After that, the transmission could be slipped into place.
Now I'm kinda scared since the transmission didn't go in all the way by hand. I started putting some bolts in and as I tightened them, the transmission got closer to the engine. I'm just scared that maybe the dowels weren't aligned and that I pushed the dowels back... Not sure if the holes were stepped to prevent that or not. However no excessive torque was required on the screws, so it's probably fine.
After that the transmission and engine were mated, I had to bolt the rear crossmember in place. That wasn't easy! If you look at the final picture below (I didn't stop to take pictures at that point, sorry), you'll see that the crossmember bolts each side into some sort of rails.
Those rails have many holes, but only one hole has a nut behind. Since the manual is shorter than the auto, I had to try and slide the nuts to other holes in the rail, closer to the engine (by seeing the shape of those rails, you can probably imagine the condition of the nuts in them. Remember how the floors were rusty). One nut was stuck and the other was free. I extracted the old nut from the rail and made new ones (I had only one piece of flatbar, and lucky me it was the right dimensions; 1"x1/8")
Warning: crappy welds ahead
After those 2 were installed, I noticed the rails weren't parallel (the closer you go to the engine, the more spaced they are) and that the slotted holes on the crossmember weren't slotted enough to reach the new holes. Since the perimeter of the crossmember has a bulge, I had to make custom washers to make sure the bolts sit level. Also, I had to slot the longitudinal holes that the mount bolts into.
I test fitted it and noticed that I slotted the longitudinal holes the wrong side... Out it came again for more modification:
Finally I managed to bolt it and support the transmission. You can see that now the bolt sits level
Now all of this could have been avoided if I had the manual-specific crossmember. I never found any, and from the info I could gather from the people doing this swap, the automatic crossmember could be modified to fit. But there seems to be 2 models of automatic crossmembers, one with 2 holes like I have, and one with 4 holes. Maybe the 2nd version was more adapted... I don't know if I'll leave it like this. I fear that the heavy slotting of the longitudinal holes might have weakened it. Also the custom washers... Not sure if it's that good.
After bolting everything I really wanted to see how the shifter felt so I installed the 1-2 shift rod. The throw is very long, but no play. I expected that, a lot of people say the shift feel isn't very good in those cars. But at least with the delrin bushings I have, it doesn't feel sloppy. Next time I'll sort out the rest of the linkage and I'll find out how the rest of the shifts are.
Now there is one more manual 190E in the world