Pedal swap time.
First of all....this job freaking sucks. Pretty much took almost all day to get done. Most people I have read about doing a auto to manual swap talk about the pedals be the worst part....well here is another vote for that. Either way, it's done now and there is now 3 pedals in the truck.
Had to remove the entire steering column
Finally got the auto pedal assembly out. Next to the hydro manual pedal assembly
And here is where I got a pleasant surprise. When I bought this pedal assembly I was told it was off a vaccum brake rig which as most of you know means the pin location is in a slightly different spot than the hydroboost brake pedal. So I was anticipating have to swap over the auto pedal over to the manual assembly and cutting the pad down. But as I started looking closely, and after measuring about 15 times, the pin whole location was the exact same as the auto assembly. Which means I got real lucky and found a hydro pedal assembly for hydroboost brakes. I was pretty happy with that. That also means I have a hydroboost brake pedal assembly for a auto complete for sale in case someone wants it. The first person I could think of was
@mrk5 since you have a manual pedal assembly but running an auto. But if someone wants to purchase this, get in contact with me
Pin location on manual pedal assembly
Pin location on auto pedal assembly I pulled out
As you can see, they were the same which made this guy a happy camper
Pulled the brake booster completely out of the way, was worth doing this for sure
I then had to drill two wholes for the two braces for the clutch pedal. Luckily, since this is an 89, I had the two little dimples on the firewall of where the bolts would go, so just drilled the wholes and bolted it up. In the pic below you can see the two studs sticking through the firewall. All I will need to do is take a whole saw and drill the whole for the master cylinder to go through and attach the rod to the pedal, but I will do that once I get the TBI350/TH400 out of the way. And that is pretty easy
And finally once I got everything back together, I had three nice shinny pedals in my rig
So, I have a few things in the mail right now. I have a ORD big block engine crossmember and ORD bolt in steering box brace on the way right now. You need the crossmember from ORD or else the 8.1 will have interference with the stock engine crossmember, and thought it was good insurance to at least have a steering box brace and it's way easier to put it in while the motor is out of the way. I also need to get some motor mounts and a new crank sensor (these fail often in 8.1's and it's going to be hard to change one once it's in this rig, so thought I would just do it now). So will order those this week and then I finally have everything at lest to bolt the 8.1/NV4500 into place. So either next weekend or the weekend after that I will get the current drivetrain pulled.
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