Does anyone have an idea of the mystery sound I get when the car is cold for more than a few hours.

Greg Brown did the trans install 6 years ago or so. This tells us it was installed right.

 

Lol thrust bearing?

 

Thrust bearing on the torque converter? I don't know anything about them. I know my thrust bearing on the engine is fine.
I just had the engine apart and it was in great shape. I checked my flex plate today and it is dead flat.

 

Check the torque on the rear flex plate bolts. Had a car with similar sound and two of he bolts were loose.

 

I am going to sound stupid but how do I get to them?

 

Not much room to work with on this one.
There is a rubber cover that you remove and it's one bolt at a time. Rotate engine as needed. Repeat.

 

Is it that little cover on the torque converter that sits at a 45 degree angle or so relative to the ground? Not the clamp cover under the heat shields right?

 

Jeff,
There should be 3 holes in the converter dome each with a rubber stopper (#15).
You will only be able to get to work through the bottom hole one bolt at a time.

 

^^ what he says.

Had a potential customer talk to me one day saying the Porsche dealership quoted him a bit over $5k for a transmission and a load of labor on top of that and I told him I'd take a look. 30 minutes later I put in new bolts and blue locktited then in and he was good to go.

5 years later the noise is still gone and the trans is just fine. Two of those bolts were moving around in the bell housing and three were loose.

 

#15 is the cover I was speaking of. I'll put the car in the air tomorrow and take them out, put loctite on them and tension them up. See if that does the job. Then again, I'll probably get a huge to do list from Sherry too so I might not get to it til Friday.

 

Best wishes.
Hope it finalizes the sound.

 

Torque specification is difficult to find/incorrect. Those bolts are grade 12.9. Torque to 24 ft. lbs.

 

In this, it says 46 Nm (34 ft.lbs)
Thumbnail page 33, pdf page 60 - 61.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzC7...it?hl=en&pli=1

 

If it's not the bolts already mentioned (most likely), it could be one of the part #6 bearings going south.

 

Those are the carrier bearings that are spoken of being replaced in Dwayne's write up?

I wonder if they were replaced as part of the transmission install by Greg?