First, I started with a lot of measurement, fitting etc. How I determined that the engine was in the right position was I measured the spacing of the engine to dog house both before and after the swap. By it being the same I knew that the trans was in the right spot.
There was no way to use the stock mounts, moving the cross member back is damn near impossible. I decided the best way to deal with this was sister a piece up, make some caps and notch the crossmember for the trans.
This is the first iteration of the brace I made. It turned out to be too short. I had to cut it out and redo it. I guess I should have measured twice.
If you notice, I didn't cut all the way through. The reason for this was I wanted everything to line up, so I started the cuts, welded it up then cut the piece all the way out.
Welded in and ready for cutting. I had been having some welder issues, so it turned out to be really nasty welding. She's strong, just really really ugly.
The really screwy thing is I'm using darn near a stock rod based column shift linkage. It took a lot of tweaking but I found the right configuration totally on accident when trying to fit a floor shifter. She shifts awesome right now.
I had to bend the "7" shaped shift rod some to make everything fit together. I also had to lower the pivot point for the rod that goes to the trans.
This is a photo of me trying to get everything aligned right for the linkage to work. Honestly it didn't work out worth squat, although I could probably fix some of that by adding some washers under the mount. It doesn't seem to matter though, it still shifts awesome.
I used the upper arm, it came with the 80. I tried the T400 one and the 700R4 ones but just couldn't get things to fall into place.
Here you can see it mounted for the final fitment. I ended up capping the ends, reinforcing/grinding on welds and then priming and painting to hide my welding sins. . If you notice I don't have any clearancing in the subframe here. It's not needed for just the 80, however with the under drive I did have to cut a small notch in it for clearances. This box is HEAVY, definitely a 2 man job to install. I could do the 60E myself, next time this has to go in our out I'm getting a transmission jack!
A word about yokes. Due to the under drive and many 4L80Es having fixed yokes at the transmission I decided to use a slip style drive shaft. I ended up getting the rear most half of a 1 ton Chevy truck. I also had to switch from a long pinion yoke back to a short pinion yoke on my 9". Overall I had a ton of hours into doing this, but hopefully someone will be able to get by with a lot less research now due to this being out there.
Right now where I stand with this, I'm fighting the Megashift transmission computer. I'll post some stuff up when I get a chance to on that.
