Did what was supposed to be a perfectly easy task, in a low-stress environment, and ended up being a 5-hour ordeal.
Change the transmission filter and pan fluid on a 5.3L 2WD 'Blazer. What's hard about that on a 2-post lift in a warm shop?
"Tolerance stacking". That has to be what happened. I can't believe they would design an exhaust system to deliberately interfere with transmission fluid pan removal, yet that's what I had to fight. Drop all the pan bolts but three, loosen and move the shifter telecable bracket out of the way (we won't discuss the forward bolt on that bracket, not in mixed company
), then remove the last three pan bolts and
'Clank!'. Maybe 1/8" - 3/16" needed for the rear lip to clear the solenoid pack, no matter which way I twisted the pan, because the exhaust crossover pipe from the left header was blocking. Loosening the tailshaft mount didn't help, finally resorted to a pry bar on the pipe to get it low enough. Clean it all up, new filter in, coax it back into position, seal it up and off the lift. 90 minutes gone.
Fill the pan, check levels, open the garage and back the beast out to the driveway. I put it into Drive to go for a quick spin around the equipment storage area and ... the damn thing won't move past a creep. What. The. Fsckin'. Hell? Reverse works great, solid bump into gear, but anything going forward is mush. Now, I'm sweating bullets.
Back inside slowly, up on the lift again, get the pan off again (ricocheting between two HOT cats for awhile), checked the new filter for cracks in the suction tube, looked for damage to the selector switching, then started looking for anything amiss on the exposed valve bodies ... and found an unseated cable connector on the rightmost rear solenoid. Wasn't off, just unclipped.
<snap!>
Button it all up again, fill, burp it, back out to the driveway, say a couple imprecations to the gods, select Drive ...