Ringgear broken teeth

[Eljaro]

Hi all,
I just installed en 8 Stack EFI in my Contemporary, after years fighting to get the Weber carburetors right. They did work quite well , but I had three engine fires, when on a warm engine I tried to start the engine.
Fuel fumes spit out of the carb throats and ignited through the vent holes in the distributor , and I had a nice BBQ fire on top of Weber Stacks.
Not nice , I can tell you. Fortunately I always have an foam fire extinguisher in the car and could put out the fire fast.

But that was it the last time it will happened.

I ordered myself a 8 Stack EFI from Jim Inglese and installed it last week.
Jim tells you that all is taken care off, but instructions are sometime confusing and in the very end you HAVE to go through several Youtube videos to see how to get it all dialed in and also download the complete Holley Terminator X help file to read it all several times to understand how that Holley EFI works and how to tune it. I managed to get the engine running quite well by transfering the learned values to the Base Fuel and it now works reasonably well.

But next morning the engine would not start , and the starter was doing strange things and giving out suspected metalic sounds.

It took me a while and in the process of starting the engine once and again and again until It could be started and all that starter abuse has broken off some teeth off the ring gear. Found today a lot of teeth in the ring gear damaged and two complete teeth missing.
So, the next unplaned job is the removal of then gearbox, or shifting it backward enough to remove bellhousing and clutch.

I have done that job several times in the past, but I an a decade older now and have forgotten how I did it last time.
Can anybody tell me if on the Contemporary Cobra you get at the clutch by removing the gearbox out of the car or is it also possible to just slide it backwards and have access to the bellhousing and clutch and then flywheel.
You comments and help will be welcomed.