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When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth ~Sherlock Holmes
the same mechanic who says you need a new wrist pin?
There are several different types of piston noise resulting from cracked pistons, piston slap, excess piston pin clearance, and other causes.•Retarding the spark timing will generally reduce the intensity of piston noise.•Grounding out the plug during the power balance test can increase a piston noise. This is the opposite result from the way a bad connecting rod reacts to ignition grounding.
Piston Pin Noise •Noise from excessive piston pin clearance makes a "double click" sound at idle or fast idle.•Pin noise often becomes more intense after the installation of new piston rings. The noise will gradually become less as the rings wear.•With the engine running at the speed where the most noise occurs, grounding the plug wire will sometimes increase the noise even more. The noise level might not increase, but it will not become less. Piston inertia causes the noise, which is why the noise does not go away when the the spark plug is shorted out.•The noise usually becomes less or goes away when the engine warms up.
righty tighty lefty loosey
As to your question on the flexplate/torque converter.......just drop the dust cover and unbolt the flexplate from the torque converter. Nothing to do with dropping the transmission at all. There is space enough to slide it rearward so it is away from the flexplate. There is a torque for every fastener. Personally I don't know what the torque for the t/c bolts off the top of my head. Also I do use loctite on torque converter bolts but, not everyone does. I am not sure what the service manual calls for but both of those questions can be answered by looking it up in the service manual. There are some to look at here on this site in PDF format. I would download the one for yours and do some reading.