Think this is for a Chevy truck. Poor thing! It must have a story to tell. It lived to run another day, maybe I will pull the cover & look around.
51 truck? closed driveline? That's a lot of work to fix a case that cost $16.35 for a new one at the dealership in 1954
i laid on a sheet of plywood for a week straight welding up my cat 977 trans when i ran it over a stump-WITHOUT the belly pan on-i had just gotten the rig that day!
My uncle had an old GMC with a pile of those little three speeds in the bed. All with broken input shafts or blown out cases. He used it to plow snow (2wd) with dual wheels, chains and a load of ballast in the bed. If it started wheel hopping in reverse it was pretty much guaranteed to break the transmission.
That may have been OK in 54, depending on what else may have been broken as well, and how long it took for the next case to arrive, and if the guy had the ability to change everything into it. If the case was broken in 84, that case may not have been available any more. I broke a 4 speed case in the 80s from a 60s model year car. Finding a replacement case wasn't even on the radar, Cost me $40 to have a patch welded on it. Sometimes you do what you got to do.
I'd be willing to bet that there was a good story behind that repair. The no readily available replacements either an empty case or a complete transmission theory probably hits the mark though.
$16.35 works out to about $192 in today's dollars, for what it's worth. I like old brazed repairs. It used to be common to see exhaust manifolds etc. repaired with braze.
The Jalopy Journal
