Toyota Tercel 4WD Wagon Repair Fiascos (#4)

[xirdneh]

Chapter 4 OOPS! Forgot to install something.
To make a short story long I will start way back in 1988 when I acquired my first Tercel4WD (1983). It had 101,000 miles on it and I paid $3500.00 for it. It was a good car right up to the day my youngest daughter rolled it in December 1999.
After work that day I had made the 18 mile trip from town to home. Along the way there was 1” of fresh snow that had melted off for the most part but there was some slush in the middle and along the edge of the road. I was worried about my kid making it home from school safely in the dark. She was late and I was preparing to head back towards town when the phone rang. It was my kid; she had hit the slush in the very corner I was thinking about driving to. She lost control and regained it along the gravel edge of the road but became high centered on that edge. Any where else along the 18 miles this would not be a problem but this was a steep drop down to a creek culvert. (33 degrees off the level of the road so climbing up from the bottom would be a 73% grade, it was at about a 30 foot vertical drop down to the creek)
She came to a complete stop before the car decided to roll over four or five times ending up upside down in the small creek. She climbed out suffering only a small cut from the broken windshield. When I arrived I noticed the faint glow of light in the fog from the headlights that were still on, pointing up the hill. It was not very noticeable but I would have seen it, because that was the spot I thought she might have trouble.
I saved the good stuff off that car and picked up another in 2000. A Tercel (1983) for $250.00 that had a bad engine and a tranny that was stuck in third gear. I swapped the tranny from the rolled car and it worked fine until August 2011. It had about 445,000 miles on it the day I messed it up. All I did was reach over and slap the shifter out of reverse to neutral (without pushing down the clutch pedal). That did something to the tranny as it would not go into any gear.
That was Ok; I had a spare tranny, so I swapped it out. Everything was fine until September 2013. While driving home (near Bremerton, WA.) from Port Angeles, WA. the car popped out of fifth gear. When I tried to put it into fifth gear it would not stay. I pulled that tranny thinking I might fix it but the shaft that fifth gear sat on was damaged. Fifth gear may have been done in by the utility trailer we often towed back and forth to Port Angeles. The local tranny shop guy told me I should never had used fifth gear while pulling that trailer.
Lucky for me one of my Tercel buddies had a spare tranny for $100.00.
My other buddy who has two Tercels had recently blown a tranny in one. I offered the tranny (with bad fifth gear) to him because the type of driving he normally does doesn't require fifth gear.
We swapped out the trannys with out removing the bell/differential housing and I took it for a test drive. It worked great over the ten mile round trip. I popped the hood to do a quick inspection and noticed gear oil all over the place.
Looking under the car it was obvious the front axle seals were not leaking and the oil was coming off the top of the differential housing and running down both sides. I had seen that before on another Tercel and that turned out to be the seal on the rear main seal retainer plate that bolts to the back of the engine. But that did not produce the large quantity of oil that we had now. Then it hit me! I forgot to install the new Input Shaft Seal on the front of the tranny.
When I acquired the tranny it was still attached to the bell/diff housing as a unit and I replaced the two front axle seals and the rear driveline seal, so I had it in my mind that I had replaced all the seals. But when I removed the tranny from my car I did not remove the bell/diff housing with it. I removed the tranny only and when I did, I removed the Input Shaft Seal because it was old and hardened but I did not install a new one at that time mainly because re-using the tranny was up in the air at the time.
We installed the tranny over at my neighbors in his large heated shop and the tranny was sitting on the floor near the car while we removed his broken tranny. I walked by it several times and remember looking down at the front of it and noticing the Input Shaft roller bearing. If my brain had been working I would have realized it was not possible to have such a clear view of the bearing with the seal installed. In my mind I had replaced all of the seals so it did not register. Doh!