20 November 2020
A few frustrating hours in the garage on Friday evening. Started by removing the flywheel and transferring the engine from the hoist on to my engine stand. That was about the only thing that was straightforward this evening. Next I tried removing the differential bushes. These are large rubber bushes encased in steel the are pressed into the differential carrier. To remove them you have to drill out the centre of the bush then the ususal method is to bash the living daylights out of the metal casing with a cold chisel and hammer, so that you drive them out. Another method I've seen is to use a gear puller to push them out using a suitable drift. Well I tried both those methods but they didn't want to move at all. I succeeded in severely distorting the metal casing but it wouldn't move. I tried the puller method but my puller kept slipping off. So I gave up on that. Thought I would start dismantling the front suspension I needed to remove the steering rack so I could remove the rest of the suspension. However I was unable to separate the steering arms from their ball joints, I started to use my ball joint separator but as it was getting late I had to leave it because I was going to need to hit it very hard and I didn't want to disturb my neighbours with the noise. 22 November 2020 Couldn't get into the garage on Saturday as the leaves in the garden needed clearing up. So Sunday I had another go at the steering rack, with a few good wacks of the ball joint separator the steering rack ball joints came loose. Then I could unbolt the rack from the subframe. Next I undid the lower bolt securing the spring/damper unit to the lower control arm so I could remove it (after unbolting the ABS sensor wire clamp. I loosened all the control arm nuts which was tricky because the subframe without the engine weight was easily pushed off the axle stands and the nuts were very tight. In retrospect I would have been better loosening all the nuts before separating the power-plant frame. I undid all the control arm bolts and removed the knuckle assemblies. Then I undid the top and bottom ball joints from the knuckle (more ball joint separator action) and removed the brake caliper, carrier and disk. I tried to remove the ABS sensor but despite applying some heat the bolt sheared off and I was not able to remove the sensor, cut the wire off and will need to research a bit more on removing the sensor from the knuckle but I will have to drill out the remains of the bolt. Back to the differential bushes. I got the diff up on the bench and got to it with the cold chisel and lump hammer. After a lot of hammering one of the diff bushes gave up the fight. The second one seemed to give up with less of a fight. The technique seems to be to push the lip in as much as possible and then turn the diff over, push the edge in where the two halves split and then hammer the bush down to drive it out. That little lot took most of the day. Time to sweep up a bit and put some tools away before dinner. I still need to dismantle the rear knuckles so I can clean them up. I will need to remove all the bushes from the front and rear control arms and then they will be ready for blasting and powder coating with the subframes.
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