October 10, 2008 – More Progress
James came over this morning and helped take some more stuff apart. Before he got here I drained the oil and removed the filter. There were many metal sparkles in the oil – lovely!
We removed the passenger side cylinder head first. I saved the hard bolts for James because it’s fun watching him put all his weight behind it to get it to budge. We got the cylinder head off without too much difficulty, but it is held on by 17 bolts and to get to 4 of them we had to loosen 4 rocker arm bolts.
We removed the water pump, optispark distributor and crank pulley. I forgot the trick on the crank pulley to put the jaws of the puller towards the inside instead of the outside. Also, we had a 19 mm socket on the 17 mm bolt so for a while we weren’t even turning the screw on the puller. I applied 350 lb-ft on the center bolt and rotated the engine a few times to watch all the rocker arms go on the passenger side and the pistons go up and down on the drivers side.
We also removed the starter. It was cracked between the solenoid that engages the gears into the flywheel. I guess because it was bolted in there so tight it kept working.
We removed the bellhousing the engine bolts. The transmission is now supported by the tunnel brace and the jack under the front.
We lowered the car, removing both the jackstands from the front and the ramps from the rear wheels. Now the car looks normal except for the hood on the roof and the exhaust under it.
Last was clean up. I put as much of the intake and heads back together as I could and boxed everything else up according to future use. Everything but the exhaust is neatly stored under the card table out of the way.
Next step – remove that engine! I’m amazed at how big the engine bay looks now. Hopefully plenty of batteries will fit in there.
