Tinkering, Part 2

Last night the sky was clear, the stars were bright, and it was cold out in the barn. Winter is definitely headed this way. We fired up the salamander and we couldn't hear much but at least the barn started to warm up a bit.

When we left off, we had removed the strut rod bracket bolts from the differential, but had not yet got the strut rods out of the way. We loosened the inner and outer strut rod bolts and the strut rods swung down easily, more or less out of the way.

When we put the axles back in last time, we found that it was tough to put them in and not accidentally knock the caps off the ends. Jeff picked up a couple of little clamps to make sure that the u-joint bearings don't go on any unplanned adventures. With these in place, I disconnected the right axle from the diff, and Jeff removed the left.

In the picture you can see the clamp on the end of the axle holding the u-joint together.

Once this was done, we disconnected the positive cable from the starter, the last connection we needed to sever, and got the jack and dolly under the car. We lifted these into place, and then got another jack under the transaxle. We lifted these just enough to take pressure off the motor mount bolts. Jeff pulled the three bolts and spacer from the transaxle, while I removed the two bolts at the rear motor mount. We began to slowly lower the motor. The motor encountered some interference at the oil filter adapter with the back of the car. We also had this problem when we put the motor in, and I think the problem is that we had the front of the car too high, so when I put the powertrain back in, we will try it with the front end down a bit.

We dropped the front considerably so that the engine would clear.

After 423 miles, the powertrain is back out of the car.

The first thing we did with the motor out was to attach the left heat shield. It is different from the right side shield, because instead of attaching to the shroud at the front, it straps to the muffler. It also leans over in the same direction as the muffler does:

Next we went to work on separating the engine and transaxle. It came apart with no difficulties.

I pulled off the old throwout bearing and could not tell any significant difference between it and the new one in terms of the way it turned, but either way, the old one is now becoming a "thrown out" bearing.

By this time it was midnight, and since I had to get up at 5:10 a.m. for racquetball the following day, we called it a night.