Thanks again for all your help, I have replaced my rear seal, pilot bearing, and clutch assembly on my 82 242. Now I have the tranny in, but I am having trouble with the holes where the tranny crossmember bolts onto the bottom of the car. Two of the four appear cross threaded.

How should I go about fixing them? I am afraid that a tap will just destroy the threads completely (I have experience with that). Would a thread chaser do the same thing? Since this is a bottemless hole, would a helicoil work? Can I get access to the other side of the hole to place a nut or bolt there? Is it possible to drill those holes out bigger and tap with a bigger size? What should I do???

Thanks,

mario m

Start with the simplest. Chase the threads, you may have only crossthreaded the first few.

Drill out the hole to next size and tap new threads.

BTW I have used helicoils where there is no stop at the back. All I do is use STUDLOCK grade Loctite. Coat the helicoil with Studlock and screw into the hole till it is flush. let the loctite dry and you should be ok. I have used this a number of times on both steel and aluminum with no problems on torgue.

What you are threading the bolt into is essentially a captured nut. A thread chaser might help clean up the threads without taking off too much material. That would be my first choice. When you tighten the bolt, make sure you can get close to factory torque specs without stripping the bolt.

Drilling and tapping doesn't sound too promising. A helicoil won't work.

To replace the captured nut, you can cut a little "flap" on the side of the frame rail and hold a new nut in there with a box wrench. Then you would weld up the flap. That is the technique I am planning to use when I installthe M-47 I have into my '83 240. There just isn't another set of holes to suport the M-47 cross brace.

Good luck.

Skip
'83 242TI
'93 850GLT
'96 850R

I repaired one of these (which was stripped) on the wife's 1986 745T by taping the hole out to the next larger US size. If I remember correctly, I used 7/16-20 UNF. The unibody metal is thin and I chose the fine pitch (UNF) over the course pitch of 7/16-14 UNC. UNF means Unified National Fine, UNC means Unified National Coarse.