After going from an occasional drip to a small puddle of what appeared to be transmission fluid, I’ve realized that at least 3 of the bell housing bolts are missing from my 68 302 3-spd MT. I haven’t had any luck finding replacements except for Mustang sites. Should be the same 6-bolt pattern, right?
Same. I will note that while you need all your bell housing bolts to be present, retaining gear oil is not one of their jobs.
Where is the puddle forming? The rear of the tranny…? I’ve blown the rear seal on one of the toploaders before and had a leak back there. It looks worse than it is and you end up not losing as much gear oil as you’d expect–just messy and it gets on the exhaust and makes it smoke (worse than it might already in my case). And do get the transmission bolted up snugly ASAP before you drive it again–I’d guess AMK has a set, or NPD. I usually re-use my old bolts, so you could probably get on WCCC’s site and get #3 used ones if you were so inclined. I am getting paranoid about the missing bolt thing as I missed an entire day of a local Cougar event where I was going to get the (crappy) front-end of my car looked over on a lift because the starter–that I had installed years ago–ending up hanging by one very loose bolt and the other side had broken the (original 1969) housing. Major bummer. I’m lucky nothing got chewed up and I was only stranded at work so it was an easy fix for me in the parking lot.