Thanksgiving Setbacks

The plan for Thanksgiving break was to have the engine in the truck right after school on Friday then throughout the week work on connecting all the cables, hoses, and wires back into the truck. That isn't exactly what ended up happening.

Friday after school I headed up to my Uncle Bryan's place where my Dad had been working on the engine for the past hour or so. Right when I pulled in I looked over and saw them both lowering the engine into the truck and rushed over to see how it was going. All seemed well and the mounts lines up for some reason it just didn't want to line up with the transmission. After playing around with it for over an hour we finally called it quits for the day and decided we'd meet up again tomorrow and keep trying.

 The next day was the same thing, we tried for nearly three hours to align the engine but it just wasn't working, eventually we got tired of the cold outdoors and having to crawl under the Pickup so we blew up its tires and pulled it into the garage with the tractor. Once we had it up on the lift it was a LOT easier to see what was going on but we still had no clue why it was going in so terribly. An hour later we finally looked at the top of the engine and noticed an inch wide gap, assuming something was in the way we just hooked the whole engine onto a ceiling mounted pulley and tugged it out once more.

Heating up the problem

There was the culprit, one of the dowels used to align the engine into the transmission snapped off of the previous motor that we had taken out. We quickly fired up the blow torch, heated up the dowel and pounded it out with a fancy air powered hammer that I had never even heard of before. Once that was out we realized that we didn't replace the pilot bearing (which is supposed to be replaced every time you change an engine.) and with that we decided to keep the engine out until we replace that. Also after a further examination of the clutch we decided that it would be fine to just keep using, but while we have the whole thing apart might as well just replace it since its a slim $80 for a whole kit.

Now all we have to do is wait for FedEx to drop off my package and we'll be ready to give my little red pickup a new heart. Even though we wasted a few hours of time at least we're correcting ourselves now and doing the job the right way.

Cleaning off the surface on the flywheel with a wire wheel