Too Much of a Good Thing

Sometimes, you can be too aggressive in your attempts to get a leg up on a problem. Examples of this may include bringing a fire hose when only a eyedropper is required, or deciding to use oven cleaner rather than simple green, just because you're in a hurry. As many mistakes are made from over application of effort as under-application.

My bus is up on six ton, 21 inch lift jack stands, which puts the bottom of the vehicle about half a meter off of the ground. This is fantastic, because when you're lying on a mechanic's creeper, it allows you to work with your arms fully extended, which really reduces the fatigue.

Unfortunately, I ran on to a problem with it came time to pull the engine: 

Skids of the ATV lift used to remove the engine are only a 15" lift. The bus is too high off of the ground
for the lift to reach the engine.

So now I'm faced with two options: lower the bus, or raise the lift. I decided not to lower the bus. Some judicious use of 2x4 lumber on the skids raised a surface enough to permit removing the engine.

THAT is one tight fit. Since the lift pivots forward to lower the load, the load moves both down and forward, just at the time when you really don't have much wiggle room front to back. There are so many engine accessories that must be removed just to get the engine to the point of having a bare 12-15mm of space front to rear within the engine bay. So it is almost a wiggling motion: pull to the back, drop the hack half an inch, pull to the back, drop, back, drop, back, drop. Over and over.

The sticking point; the engine is as far back in the bay as it will go, but the bottom studs have not cleared
from where they pass through the transmission housing.

Well, I bent up the end of the oil filler to straighten the engine out enough to get the bottom studs out. But I had to grab the exhaust and lift steadily to change the angle of the engine so that these bottom studs would disengage without bending. Better the oil filler banged up (bolt on replacement) than the studs. (Not so bolt on.)

The input shaft from the transmission has
cleared the clutch disk, but those studs at the
bottom are still not quite free.

I've pulled a few engines in my time, all VW aircooled. My first was a 1600cc TypeI single port from a 1968 Karmann Ghia in 1991, and I've pulled (and installed) six or seven more in the intervening time including a 1971 Bus engine in a parking lot with only a cheap jack and some 2x4s liberated from a nearby dumpster. The Bus engine I did in six hours working by myself from the time the engine was delivered to the parking lot, and drove it to work the next day.

So I would not consider myself inexperienced. Perhaps a dilettante, but not without having run the gauntlet a few times. Perhaps I was more haphazard in my youth and that lead to better work times (and more parts left over.) That 1971 Bus was the all time worst, since I had never experienced fiddling with a rear engine carrier bar before, and didn't really have either the muscle or equipment to do right by it. So I had to invent levers out of those liberated 2x4s to make the engine tip in the directions I needed it to so that all of the fittings would line up.

Engine on the ground, fully disengaged.

So while I won't credit this engine pull as the worst, having the body too high off of the ground and a less than practiced eye for this model and design, I had some "sweat, swear, and try again" moments. But all being equal, it was one hour from beginning the pull to the time that the engine was on the floor and no longer properly part of the vehicle. I hauled it around to the edge of the vehicle, photographed it a dozen different ways for documentation, and then stashed it still on its jack under the workbench so that I would have more swing space to work in the rest of the garage. There is still the fuel tank and the transmission to remove before I get to start putting things back together. Whyfor? Well the engine has to come out to get the fuel tank and the trans out, the tank has to come out to be replaced, and the trans has to come out so I can install $5 of rubber and plastic bushings that have given up the ghost and caused the shifting to feel like a garbage truck, with Ouija board vagueness in gear locations, making the search for second gear more of an epic than it should be.

Progress!