[alexpinson5]

Sorry to bump an old thread but I was wrestling with my transmission last night and just wanted to add what worked for me should someone else's Google-fu lead them here like it did me.

Threading the two studs into the engine as mentioned here probably would have helped a lot. So does a buddy to have eyes on the front of the transmission while you shift it around in the back. Out of sheer stubbornness and/or not finding this thread until it was too late, I did neither.

I was able to get the transmission pretty close by eye but I was fighting the alignment of the transmission up and down (think a truck with a broken frame, the bed and cab are sagging in the middle). I had a jack on the engine and a transmission jack at the back of the trans that let me adjust this, but it was really difficult to eyeball and of course if it's not perfect it doesn't push in. What I did was take a random socket whose diameter was close to the gap between the engine and transmissions' mating surface. Using some of the longer mounting bolts I could get them started into the threads making sure things were pretty well aligned. The threads can NOT bind, you don't want these supporting the weight of the transmission yet or you can foul up the threads. Once in place I could jack things up and down and get a feel for the threads to tell if they were aligned with both the engine and trans. Once close here I took that socket (in my case, the round end of a 3/8" drive 6mm hex bit for the pressure plate bolts) and used it as a spacer all the way around. I inserted it in four spots (12, 3, 6, and 9 o'clock) and tightened screws and adjusted the jacks until the gap was even all around. Once it was even I knew things were aligned and I could start tightening bolts.

You have to be pretty careful doing this, the screws should be almost loose enough to tighten by hand the entire time so they aren't supporting the weight of the transmission. If the splines aren't aligned you could also damage them if you keep tightening and the trans isn't going. I took it VERY slowly to take the trans the last half inch or so to the mating surface on the engine, but once I started using the socket as a spacer to check alignment all around it was much easier.

Edit: to clarify, this isn't using the bolts to actually pull the transmission into alignment - I was using the 'feel' of the threads turning by hand to tell which side needed to move and then sliding things together by hand. The key for me getting the last half inch or so was using the spacer to check my alignment and things were easy from there.