I broke the T-5 in my car in the middle of October. I have been racing the car for about a year and a half almost every weekend. I always have speedshifted the car like everyone else who races a stick car and i'm pretty quick at it but one night at the track my dad and i got the bright idea to powershift the car, you know staying in the gas while shifting, that turned out to be a bad idea. As the transmission was making funny noises and 4days later it finally gave up the ghost. That weekend I pulled the transmission out and parked the car on the curb in front of my mom's house. At a shootout at the track my dad and I were out there and while setting up his car for the race we started thinking of what transmission to put in my car: t-56, tko-600, tko-500, we couldn't figure out what to go with. We started talking to a friend of my dad's about it and he said why don't you think about putting a toploader in it, it was a good option, i just didn't know if it was possible but my dad told me people were doing that alot when the foxbodies came out. I raced my dad's car that weekend and after breaking the rearend in it in qualifying I wasn't feeling to good about myself since I just broke two cars in two weeks, we limped the car on home and when we got there i started looking online if there was anything about putting toploaders in foxbodies and there definitely was: i found quite a few forum threads of people who had done it and i found a few websites that were offering instructions on how to do it. The easiest set of instructions i found was at davidkeetoploaders.com. It said that if you use a McLeod or Lakewood conversion bellhousing they will allow you to retain your stock clutch, flywheel, and cable clutch assembly, and the perfect toploader is one that is 24in long from tip of tailshaft to surface where the bellhousing bolts to it and has wide ratio gears and it said to run a Hurst Competition plus shifter. The only mods would be to take the stock trans crossmember and cut the welds holding the middle to the outer bushing barrel mounts and putting the middle as far forward on the barrels as you can and cutting the curve out of the arm of the Comp Plus shifter and re-welding it. I'm going to follow it most of the way but not so up to the shifter mod though, i think i'm going to run the Verti-gate shifter that my dad's got. luckily I bought most of everything I needed before I got laid-off from work. Well i've got the right bellhousing and the right trans so everything is coming together...slowly.
Ram billet steel flywheel and Zoom kevlar clutch
Lakewood blowproof steel bellhousing: this is the main part of this conversion. Lakewood makes this bellhousing specifically to allow you to put a toploader into a foxbody Ford
The old T-5
The new/old Doug Nash clutchless toploader that my dad had in storage for over 20 years. took it to a trans shop and found out it wasn't clutchless
I pulled center console out so when i get the new trans and shifter in there i can see if i have to cut the shifter hole anywhere to make the shifter fit
Ram billet steel flywheel and Zoom kevlar clutch
Lakewood blowproof steel bellhousing: this is the main part of this conversion. Lakewood makes this bellhousing specifically to allow you to put a toploader into a foxbody Ford
The old T-5
The new/old Doug Nash clutchless toploader that my dad had in storage for over 20 years. took it to a trans shop and found out it wasn't clutchless
I pulled center console out so when i get the new trans and shifter in there i can see if i have to cut the shifter hole anywhere to make the shifter fit