It's A Mystery 

Out behind our house is a wetland, and a woodsy spot with trails that are mostly used by the Lindbergh High School Cross-Country team.  We walk those trails regularly with dog in tow (or while being towed by) and are familiar with the ways and their denizens.  I think I mentioned before that the land had been deeded to the County as a passive park, which left us in the great position of having a permanent green belt behind our house.  Eventually the Soos Creek trail will run through on the way from Lake Meridian in Kent and the Cedar River Trail that starts in Renton.

Much like the story of Peter and the Wolf, everything inside our fence is safe country, for the most part, and outside is a scary place patrolled by packs of coyotes, the occasional bobcat, gray squirrels and rabbits, lots of rabbits.  Crows, woodpeckers and barred owls can be seen, and we have even had pileated woodpeckers in our back yard attacking the suet cake feeder.

As this story goes, I was walking the old dog, Harley, one day, and as we worked our way down the steep side of the hill I noticed a rusty hunk of metal half-buried in the bushes just off the trail. A closer inspection revealed that it was a Ford three-speed transmission, with a cast iron bell housing still attached.

Like all neighborhoods, this one has a history.  Before WWII it was a marshy, logged-off swamp.  My brother and I used to ride our bikes from Top Hat down and across the Kent valley to visit one of our buddies who had moved to the new Cascade Vista development.  One of life’s little ironies is that my wife and I lived in that neighborhood in a rental house for 19 years before we bought the one which we now occupy.  Some time in that distant past, somebody parked an old rig on top of the hill behind my neighbor’s house and took it apart.  Most of the pieces of sheet metal are still there, unrecognizable due to rust and disintegration

I took a few pictures of the transmission and shared them with my buddies from our Thursday lunch group, most of whom are old car guys.  They got rather excited about the possibility that this part could still be used someday.  That was all I needed to hear, so the next week my wife and I went out there with a hand truck and drug that old hunk of iron back up the hill from where it had lain for an unknown period.  I figured, since this land was now a park, it was our civic duty to remove litter and garbage any chance we got.

But beyond that, it becomes an issue of value.  Something like a car transmission is made up of many parts, starting with a series of castings, the gear box, the tail shaft and the bell housing, inside of which are gears, shafts, synchros, bearings and all the other small parts that make it work.  All of these parts are cast from iron, forged from steel or cut from stock by machinists and other skilled trades people from foundry to factory.  At every step in the way people laid their hands on it and added value to it.  If the results of all that labor is thrown down a hill to rust away, the accumulated value is lost.

The other modern wrinkle to the old auto parts story is the internet, which now make available all those old part numbers and makes it easy to trace almost any part back to the original application.  That is where this individual transmission becomes very interesting, indeed.

It seems that, back around 1966, Ford needed a new three-speed transmission to install in their V-8 powered trucks and full size cars, and this RAT model is the one they came up with, known as a top-loader after the tin cover on top of the gearbox.  The funny part is, about that same time GM was having a problem with their transmissions being too weak to handle the increased horsepower generated by the small block engines they were making.  Their new version was not ready, so for a couple of years they bought the transmission from Ford, bolted on a different bell housing and tail shaft housing to match up with the GM power trains, and there they were!  That’s why if you dig deep enough you will find charts that show the same transmission was used in Ford Broncos and F100 pickups and also the 1966 Pontiac Catalina, a thought that the GM fanciers in the never-ending argument about which is better, Ford, GM or Mopar, must find extra galling, and of which the Ford folks never let them hear the end.

This story is still open, so we don’t know how it ends, yet.  I did pull the top cover off and expose the inner works to the sun for the first time in many a year, and found much yuck and eww, but also saw a complete, possibly rebuildable transmission that was all there.  The only lingering mystery is why someone saw fit to pick up an 80 pound chunk of cast iron and steel and throw it over the edge of the hill.  I can only suspect much beer was involved.  :-{)}