Auto to stick swap help needed

[Raser13]

Hey guys and gals, I'm kind of a lurker here but I need your help. My brother has an 89 Broncos with the 2.9L in it. It started life as a 4X4 stick truck. The previous owner burned up the stick tranny, and put in a 2wd auto tranny in it. But when my brother bought it the auto was on it's last leg. So we decided to track down a 4X4 stick tranny and bring it back to stock.

Evidently the 2.9L with a 4X4 stick is a rare beast around the st louis area. Lol. But We now have the tranny and transfer case. We're running into a snag when we are trying to mate up the motor and trans.

We know that we have the input shaft mated with the flywheel and the clutch plate. But as we try to align it and bring the two together the tranny is a good 1/2 inch to 1 inch away from the motor.and it won't go any closer. It's acting like somthing is in the way. We can get bolts into the motor and try to walk it in but it still acts like something is definitely in the way.

So we made sure to stop before we broke anything. We pulled the tranny back off to see if we couls figure out what is going on. We can't see what the problem is. Any suggestions? We're there different sized input shafts maybe between years or something?

It's the only thing that i can think of that might be hitting that far out.

Thanks for any help you can throw our way

 

[don4331]

M5OD-R1 from a 4.0 Ranger would bolt to 2.9 and they should be dime a dozen; but that is beside point now.

So, before you bolted the flywheel on to the engine, did you replace the throw out bearing? And when you bolted up the flywheel, did you use an alignment tool? If the throw out bearing isn't concentrically aligned with clutch, you won't be able to bring the transmission and engine together.

Does that help?