How To Remove Muncie 4 Speed Transmission 1964-72 Pontiac GTO PART 1

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Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing or maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20-plus years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly: that's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

In this video, we're going to replace a tired and worn out Muncie 4 Speed transmission in a '66 GTO. This Muncie-style transmission is basically the same as the Saginaw as well, so this procedure on this video covers all kinds of different GM vehicles from '64 through the late'70s with 3 and 4 speed transmissions. There are no special tools required. You need various wrenches and sockets ranging in 1/2 inch to 3/4 inch and some of those sizes could vary per vehicle, some pliers, jack and four jack stands or lift, flat blade screwdriver, catch pan and a clutch disc line up tool if you're replacing the clutch. This video just replaces the transmission but, if you're going further and replacing the clutch, you'll want a line up tool for when you put that clutch back together.

The first thing I'm going to want to do is remove the shift knob and sometimes there's a little lock nut underneath; this one just screws right off.

Now, you want to raise the car up and secure it with jack stands. I'm shooting this video with a lift which makes it a lot easier both to work and to shoot the video. You want to jack the car up; you want to have probably the wheels a good 8 to 12 inches off the ground. That gives you a lot of clearance underneath to get the transmission down and out. Again like I said, jack it up and secure it with four jack stands. Next, we want to disconnect the drive shaft. You can either put your car in gear or have the emergency brake on.

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We'll need your truck to pull on the trees."?

Okay. Bye-bye."?

These are 1/2 inch bolts. I'm just going to speed up here as I take off those nuts that hold those U-clamps and I apologize for the angle. I didn't realize that I wasn't shooting this very well until afterwards. Then what you can do is take your wrench and put in here and you just push it forward a little bit and these yokes come out. There go my washers. You can push it back in until you're ready. Pull this shaft forward, and pull it out of the rear-end. You want to have a catch pan underneath because when you pull this out, although our transmission may be a little low on fluid, and you actually want to put . I have an extra yoke that I can put up in there.

I'll give a little better explanation here. When you pull the drive shaft out of the transmission, you risk leaking fluid out of the transmission, so you want to either have a catch pan underneath and then what I did is I have an extra yoke that I was able to put back into the transmission. Once you pull the drive shaft out, if you tip the transmission backwards you are going to get some fluid leaking out of it.

We want to remove our crossmember, so you're going to remove these two bolts here and then you're going to take apart these two bolts on the side and then these two bolts on the side here, as well. These two bolts are 5/8 inch. Then, what I have here is a jack so you can see I can just jack my transmission right up. I hear it contact the floor of the car. Now for these bolts, I've got a 9/16 inch wrench to hold the top and a 9/16 inch socket. I'm just going hit a little fast forward as I remove the other three of those bolts that hold the ends of the transmission crossmember. Now, you just want to pull the crossmember back and then slide it.

If you let your transmission back down, support it just a little bit. You can see here the shifter's connected to the transmission with a couple of 9/16 inch nuts here. There are three of them: one, two and three. I'm sorry: one, two, three. You want to remove these. We'll fast forward here, again, as I remove the nuts that hold the shift lever arms onto the transmission.

This right here is your reverse switch. There's a little rod and it has a little clip in it. Hopefully you can see what I'm doing here. I'm going to grab the clip with these needle-nosed pliers, at some angle hopefully . there we go. Pull that clip off and that comes out.

Now, you want to remove the shifter which is two bolts here. One's a 9/16 inch. Again we'll speed things up as I remove that bolt. Before we take the shifter all the way up, there's a speedometer cable right here, you should be able to latch on it with a set of pliers, pull it out. I'll get this 5/8 inch bolt up here. Once again, we'll hit a little fast forward as I just remove that bolt. You don't pull that bolt all the way out. You loosen it up all the way and then kind of pull it down with the shifter. What you can do is twist that out and then pull it right down.

Now, if you follow this up, this is our back up lead. There's a connector right up here. I'm not sure how well you're going to see this. Put my screwdriver in. There's a little tab. Pull down on the lead and it comes out. Now the transmission is just held in by four bolts: here, one up there and on the other side, one there and one up there. I'm going to use a wrench and a piece of pipe for some leverage. It's a little bit more difficult up in here. I just wanted to show you that wrench and pipe trick to get those bolts out. I'm going to speed it up here and I just take the bolts the rest of the way out with my impact wrench but I do want to show you using the wrench and the pipe just because not everybody has the air tools like I'm using.

Now, you take your jack out of place. You want to make sure you have your emergency brake cables up and on top of the transmission and then you have a helper .helper? . lift up on the transmission and pull it right back and bring the front down. Couple notes here: if you're doing this on your driveway with the vehicle up on jack stands it's actually easier to do it with one person. What you do is you put yourself right under the transmission as if you're going to bench press it. So, put the transmission right over your chest, lift it up and slide it out and then let it down onto your chest. The transmission weighs I'd say probably about 60 pounds, so it's not extremely heavy and this is the aluminum style, Muncie transmission, other transmissions weigh differently. It's 60 pounds so it's heavy but it's not incredibly heavy. I've done it plenty of times before, I just lay down underneath it, pull it down, put in onto my chest and then let it slide off me carefully to the side then get out from under the car and pull it out. Just another note:, the guy helping me there is the CEO of our company; he works on cars too.

It just so happens that in our garage we have a spare Muncie transmission sitting around from a project that we kind of changed course on and we're going to put that in. We're going to end this first part of our video and,
to see us re-install this transmission into the GTO, check out part two.

We hope this video helps you out. Brought to you by www.1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the Internet. Please feel free to call us toll-free, 888-844-3393. We're the company that's here for you on the Internet and in person.