never in a thousand years!!!!
 

while installing my new TCI 300 stall. After I got the tranny bolted back up to the engine and I started bolting the TC to the flexplate I realized that 1 of the three holes on the flexplate was smaller than the other 2!! Un F#@$% believable! I spent about 2 hours with a dremel and a tap and die to finally fix that. So a little FYI to everyone.......check to make sure that your bolts fit into ALL THREE holes on the flexplate BEFORE bolting the tranny back up! Will save you a lot of frustration and time!

Curtis

That hole is smaller for a reason. You start that hole FIRST, so that you can torque the bolt down, before moving on to the other two. Thats like the "alignment" hole. If you do that one first, the other two will go right in.

the bolts that came with the TCI converter would not fit in that hole at all! Very strange that they didn't manufacturer an oem sized bolt

When I replaced my verter I noticed what I thought to be the same thing, however after fiddling with it a little bit, the bolts THREADED through the flexplate.

I've since found that same occurrence on a light weight TCI flexplate we put in a friends 94 camaro. The bolts didn't pass through one hole on the flexplate, they had to be threaded through, but they went in without modification, or any real force. Took less than 10ft lbs to thread them through.

Ooops, didn't know TCI bolts were bigger. Thanks for clearing that up.

They're quite a bit larger than OEM. Don't know why though. The TCI bolts are too big for the TCI verter even. That's what gets me. :confused:

My TCI bolts fit my TCI converter fine. They just want to make sure that sucker is on there. If you would have researched you would have seen that enlarging that one hole is just part of the deal with a TCI.

I got jimmyblue's old tci and it uses the factory bolts. I also have a somewhat new tci, same part number, that uses 7/16" bolts.

I posted here not too long ago about the first thing to do while installing a new converter. And that is to hold it up to the flex plate and bolt it on. I had to drill only the slotted hole on my 2002.
After that take the tc off and put it in the trans during installation.

My understanding is torquing down one bolt all the way before moving on to the other two is just asking for a cracked flexplate. The way it was explained to me, you want to tighten the verter bolts in two passes. The first pass, you want to tighten ALL of the bolts until they snug against the converter and then back them off a quarter turn. On your next pass you can torque them down all the way.

You'll crack the flexplate if you use that one bolt to pull the converter to the plate. If its already up against the flexplate, should be OK.

Gotcha, just making sure.

I was helping Curtis with the install and I have a TCI 3K just like his that I installed in 03 with no problems like he encountered. This was a total shock. I remember Curtis specifically trying to put all three of the bolts that came with the converter into the aforementioned "alignment hole"- I was turning the crank right behind him so I could see very well. Before we bolted the bellhousing to the motor we pre aligned the verter to match up with that hole. After unsuccessfully trying to put all three bolts into that hole, I tuned the crank and we got all three of the bolts to fit into the other two spots on flexplate. We employed the two pass torquing method. Plain and simple those bolts would not fit in that hole. Strange.