The La Brea Tar Pits is one of my favorite places, having first visited in a 3rd Grade field trip  before there was a Page Museum on the site. If saber tooth tigers, dire wolves, mastodons and mammoths interest you, then there is no better place in the world than the La Brea Tar Pits. https://tarpits.org And if you are on this site because you like automobiles, the Peterson Museum is across the street and down 2 blocks. https://www.petersen.org

After visiting the tar pits, we got back to Michigan business by putting on a new set of tires and investigating the cause for the terrible noises in reverse.

Four new NON SKID shoes for the Michigan – $2160 and you can install them yourself.

Clarence’s assistance made tire mounting so much easier than trying to do it solo. Thank you, Clarence. To fully understand the way new tires are mounted on our Michigan, you should probably visit my web page that talks about our Detroit Demountable Rims, which although NOT unique to Michigan cars, are fairly unusual. https://michiganmotorcar.com/nuts-bolts-2/shortsville-whee…demountable-rims/

Then we tried to figure out what might be this issue with the REVERSE noise. We jacked up the rear of the car with the REVERSE gear engaged so we could manually turn over the transmission by rotating the rear wheels. During this, we left the observation hatch open – Yes, there is an observation hatch for adding heavy oil and looking at the gears.  (But you better not have it open while operating the car, because you will get drenched.)

Transmission with observation hatch open.

With me peering into the transmission with the shifter in REVERSE and Clarence rotating the rear wheels slowly forward and back, I could just make out a gear jumping up and down. This gear was the reverse idler gear. It is the one at the very bottom of the transmission on a shaft by itself. Of the many things a gear might do (mostly going round and round or sliding along a shaft when the shifter is moved, this particular gear was jumping up and down on the shaft each time the rear wheels changed direction. The jump was not along the axis of the shaft, but up and down ON the horizontal shaft – like it was terribly loose. It wobbled a bit too. Yeeks! That is not a thing a transmission gear should be doing. So…… I was destined to pull the transmission and figure out why this gear was so jumpy.

Before Clarence & Sally left to return to Indiana, we manually backed the car into the driveway for a photo op.

L to R = Tori, Craig, Sally, Janet and Clarence