All in a Day's Work

I've been wanting to get the engine pulled out of 3 for a while, but as always happens,life gets busy. The plan, of course, was to swap it into Scruffy. Well, smog check time is coming up, and the P0410 air injection code has been coming back on and off. Took it over for the check, it had been a good spell without the light coming on. Less than a block away, it comes on. Sigh. I pull off onto a side street and reset it, then for the check, it hadn't gotten enough data to re calibrate it, so it failed. He checked the exhaust afterwards, and it's got a little smoke coming out, and he says it fails for that, too, but I think he wouldn't have gone there if the computer check had passed.

So, this weekend took it down to my parents' house where there's a big, flat driveway and went to work. It drove way better than I'd thought it would, with the steering wheel all tweaked. To make things easy, the hood comes off first, and since it was tweaked, pulled the whole front bumper cover off, as well as the headlights. The bumper core had an amazing crease down the middle, and the side of the frame rail was nicely accordioned, but I didn't get a shot of that.

Of course, it's not a one-man job, at least not for me!!! I enlisted the younger boy, and he comported himself quite admirably, considering he has close to zero experience working on cars. There's a multitude of little stuff to disconnect and remove, and he helped with a good amount of it, as well as the actual removal. Pretty much got all but one thing disconnected, the connection from the steering rack to the column. Started lowering it down, and that side wasn't dropping.

Speaking of dropping, that was the method I elected to go with, disconnect everything, unbolt the subframe (only 4 bolts!!!) then lower it out the bottom. I'd heard of people doing it with lifts, and figured I'd have to drop it, then the weight would shift more to the back, and I'd probably have to raise the body some more. Got it dropped, and it's within a couple inches of clearing. Got on the back bumper and bounced on it, and it looked like there was close to enough room to slide it out. My son couldn't get it moving, so we switched, and got it rolled out!!!

There it is!!! Gotta do the same to Scruffy, and I'm planning on unbolting the engine from the transmission, and swapping it to the recently rebuilt transmission in Scruffy.

All in a day, I couldn't be more pleased with the progress!!!