A friend of mine was recently working on his 1990 Toyota 4Runner. He was removing the transmission to put a new clutch in. Once he got everything disconnected, and went to pull the tranny back out of the engine, the transmission moved about an inch and then wouldn't pull back any more.
He double, triple, quadruple checked that all of the bellhousing bolts, driveshafts, shift linkages etc were detached, and got a few guys under there to slam the transmission back and forth in an effort to free it from the engine. (Note: slamming it back and forth is really only safe when it's fully chained to a transmission jack, and even then it could still be risky if it broke free. this is just the disclaimer part in case some idiot injures himself due to my advice) Still nothing.
The best guess as to what was happening was that the pilot bearing (that centers the transmission input shaft in the flywheel) over time had sized onto the transmission input shaft, and it was getting caught on the clutch disc keeping the transmission from pulling back and free from the engine.
His last resort was to hack a hole in the side of the bellhousing (he of course has another one lined up) in order to access the necessary bolts to unbolt the clutch and pressure plate assembly from the flywheel so that it could be removed with the transmission.
Success!
Here's the post on Yotatech:
http://www.yotatech.com/f116/transmission-removal-woes-input-shaft-siezed-184161/
Tags: trouble transmission removal
2009-06-15 Comment On This
One of the famous hills on the Whipsaw trail in B.C., Canada, is Falcon Hill. It's name comes from a few guys who drove the trail in 1979 in a Ford Falcon. The only mods the Falcon apparently had were 33 inch studded snow tires, and they drove the whole trail.