Saturday was spent on the gas tank (easy), driveshaft (easy), and front suspension (major pain).
In theory, each suspension arm comes off with only three bolts. Sweet, should be quick. Nope. Remember that long bolt in the rear? It's shorter on the front, but just as bad. There's one with a bolt through two frame locations, bushing with a metal sleeve in the middle between. We had to cut that off from both sides. Took a while, given the awkward location, hard steel, and my slightly underpowered compressor.
Got that off, and went to remove the rear brackets. On the drivers side, one came off easily, the other spun in place. The bolt went into a nut that was "permanently" welded onto the frame. I wish. The next hour was spent creating an access hole through the wheelwell to get to the back side of that weldnut, which was not-so-welded, and trying to get a solid enough grip on it with visegrip pliers that we could rattle away on it with the impact gun.
Frustrating day, but we got the front suspension and axles out of the way, along with the front subframe.
Sunday: Got up, had breakfast, and headed to my family's house to fetch the Sunfish (small sailboat) to bring to the summer place. We visited with family for a bit, made the drive, and were back home to start on the car around 5:30.
We began with freeing up the wiring harness, first from inside, then severing connections in the engine bay. We fished those through to the cabin, and pulled it out. Yikes. It was an entire armfull. The wiring "diet" may be interesting.
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| Previously removed section on right, main harness on left. |
From there, we removed the pedals, chased out the throttle cable, brake booster, drained the clutch master, etc.
We sat back for a minute, and realized we were actually ready to pull the engine. We spent a little time getting the area ready- We'd had a table sitting up in front of the car, cleared it off & moved it out of the way. We looked around the engine for suitable hookup points: A nice bracket by the AC, the location for the rear pitch stop mount, and a bracket next to that.
We decided to pull the tramsmission with the engine, keep things simple that way. After we found bolts and hooked everything up, it was time to start removing the crossmembers from the bottom. We removed the nuts for the engine mounts, then the transmission mounts, then dropped the front crossmember off, and the engine was floating freely. Looks like we got the load leveling about right!
With the engine floating, it was just a matter of sliding it little by little, tipping as necessary (a lot!) and moving it forward. Halfway through, we decided the car needed to move down, as we were running out of overhead space- The ceiling in the garage is only a few inches over 6 feet. We jacked up the frame, lowered the jackstands, and set it back down. Once at the new height, it wasn't bad to get the engine out. That transmission is long though, when it's in the way of lifting the assembly out of the car!
After the engine was free, we were left to figure out what to do with it! It clearly wasn't going to fit into the basement with the rest of the parts.
We settled on resting it on the front crossmemeber, so that the mounts were supporting the weight of the engine, not the oilpan. In turn, the crossmember rested on the legs of our engine hoist. More than good enough to leave overnight, or even for a few days.
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| It's free! |
As an amusing side note, I can now pick up the front or back half of the car, pivoting on the 2/3 point at the other end of the jack stands. Good news, since we're going to have to get rid of this shell somehow! We will probably offer it up for someone to use as a rally base, but otherwise it's scrap metal.
We're happy, tired, and going to enjoy a little homebrew beer before some well deserved sleep!
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