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Unhinged: Removing The Heart Of The Beast (And Cleaning Up The Blood)


Unhinged: Removing The Heart Of The Beast (And Cleaning Up The Blood)

“I’ve only got three bolts holding in a crossmember. We undo those, and wrestle everything out, and we will be done. Should be a piece of cake. You in?”

Famous last words. After nearly a month of dawdling and dodging some really crappy weather around BangShift Mid-West, yesterday was The Day: the Rollover Explorer was going to have it’s running gear raided in the hopes that I can get that property value-bombing eyesore out of my yard as soon as freaking possible. I had intended for the crunched SUV to be gone by April Fool’s Day, but eight days later I had a weekend full of great weather, an engine hoist in the shop, tools, and an energy drink to get my ass in gear first thing in the morning. I had talked my friend Chris into coming over and “helping”…see also: watch this royal cluster you-know-what go down…and figured that between the two of us, it wouldn’t take too long. I wasn’t sure that there were only three bolts left holding everything from the fan to the tail end of the transfer case in place, but what the hell…at least 95% of it was undone, and I knew that the engine would come up off of the mounts. Good enough.

At eight in the morning, I was opening up the shop, gathering up the tools, rolling out the compressor and the impact wrench, and preparing. At 9 A.M. sharp, the compressor got kicked on whether my neighbors were ready or not. Twenty minutes later, Chris showed up and we started rigging up the chains and the hoist in preparation for removal of the final bolt from the crossmember, which we anticipated would allow the t-case to drop onto the awaiting floor jack, and from there we’d just jack the engine up, push the truck back, repeat until everything was loose.

That’s optimistic thinking. Here’s what really happned: by a quarter ’till ten, we were ready to start the removal process. From ten until almost two in the afternoon, we fought that mother tooth and nail. Whoever thought jamming a 302 and a 4R70W into the frame of a Ranger is a sadist…even with everything hacked away and the core support missing, we fought that bastard until we both were spewing foul words in death-metal growls. (He’s a former Marine, I’m former Army. Swearing at things that piss you off is an Olympic sport to us.) Hard work and persistence, however, paid off and we had our prize resting on the front bumper, with NOT ONE DROP of fluid on the ground. It was a miracle.

Then I made the call to yank the transfer case off so that we could get the weight off of the hoist. And that’s the moment that I turned the concrete pad in front of my house into a gruesome murder scene. The second the T-case dropped, so did enough ATF that in a blind panic to keep the oil contained, I grabbed potting soil to put down to keep the damage to a controllable area. Crisis contained for the moment, we decided that it was break time, so we went into Bowling Green to get some oil-dry and some food.

With a mixture of overrated cat litter and posh dirt soaking up the Explorer’s bleed-out, our next task was to separate engine from transmission. The 4R70W has to go into a shop to be converted to handle rear-drive-only duty, and I wanted the 302 on the stand so that I can clean up and check out the engine. Except this presented a problem: the one engine chain we had been using was a very short length, and we effectively drug the engine out of the Explorer by two bolts at the front of the engine. Ideal? Hardly. Back into town we go, to get chain and some longer bolts for the engine stand.

Have you ever botched the mission? We sure did…the chain we bought at a home improvement store was about three links too short to do a proper cross-over setup. Special Ed Mechanic fix was to bolt the two short pieces together, which functioned well enough. The transmission separated from the engine just fine, and with a bit of work we had it on the stand and in the shop in the corner where it will reside for the time being. But the trans itself is something else altogether…the 4R70W is a nose-heavy son of a bitch, and we were not going to cart it to the shop. Solution?
Put trans onto useless hood, hook heavy chain to hood, and HEAVE, YOU VIKINGS! that mother until you have it where you want it. I would claim something like “Work Smarter, Not Harder” but this doesn’t exactly look smart. Functional, yes, but that is not the peak of intelligent design by any measure.

So for all of the hours of fun today, what really got accomplished? I’m almost done with the Explorer. I have to drop the entire front suspension and yank some parts out of the rear axle and it’s off to be squished into a Campbell’s Soup can for what I care. I have exactly what I paid good money for in the shop and I’m another step forward on the Great Pumpkin project. And I got to kill a day BS-ing with someone while spinning wrenches. That’s a damn good day no matter how you look at it. And I’ll remind myself that tomorrow as I’m applying some sunburn cream to my formerly pasty-ass white legs.


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4 thoughts on “Unhinged: Removing The Heart Of The Beast (And Cleaning Up The Blood)

  1. jim

    I hope this is “The End”. This isn’t even a little bit funny. Never been to the opera but I bet it couldn’t be any worse.

  2. C.M. Bendig

    I went to help a buddy get the engine out of a Dodge Shadow Convertible some years back. That guy does Dodge FWD stuff, so it was not something new to him, or me. Then engine had locked up when moving it in to the work area from the storage spot. It took us 3 hours to get the crankshaft rotating so the torque converter bolts would come out. This was a car being repaired, not scrapped. Vice versa and a hot wrench would have been used to rid excess metal.

    Locked up engines in FWD’s can be a real bear when it comes to the small clearances left compared to older RWD vehicles that a torque converter could at times come out with the engine.

    I have one of those 302 Explorers… a 96 4 door and my Y pipe is rotten. That wouldn’t be BG Ohio or Ky?

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