. . . Aaaaaaand the rest

Been busy the past several hours.  Check the progress report!

The distributor wrench was a huge help in getting the two side bolts of the upper three bellhouse fasteners torqued.  They weren't a silver bullet, though; I had to torque them by feel.  Since the socket adapter and angles of the wrench bends required a lot of bracing and additional force to be applied to the wrench, my torque wrench would slip off before it could give me my satisfaction click.  Not a big deal, though - they should be pretty damn close, and I could reach the other three bellhouse bolts to click as much as I could ever want.

All in all, I'm really glad that I ended up getting the distributor wrench, since I wouldn't have been able to tighten those bolts much without it.  I'll be amazed if I ever use it on a distributor clamp bolt, though.

The order of tasks is just like it's mapped out in that tree, though I got the throttle pressure cable done while I was in crossmember country.  I repeatedly made a huge mess with the loctite while bolting the TC to the flexplate, which is how I know I was using it right.  The starter was also a pain to install, as usual.

What was a little unusual was the condition of the starter drive gear.

I'm not sure what to make of that at the moment.  While this starter probably has less than 100mi on it, I was not the one who installed it.  This was replaced back in the dark prehistory of this project, as a part of working on the electrical problems that were starting to become more frequent (starter prior to this one suddenly wouldn't engage, despite having all the electrons it could want.), so I have no way to know what relation, if any, this has with the damage seen in the old flexplate. 

If I would have thought about it more, I would have held off on installing the starter.  I'll pull it and give it a session on the test bench before first start, but I'm not going to interrupt my work flow to attend to it right now.  If I keep things moving at this rate, I may actually have this thing on the road before I have expected for a while now