Wednesday, March 9, 2011

The Great Bronco Engine Transplant- No Retreat No Surrender

Bruce Springsteen sings a song called "No Surrender". In the chorus is a line "No retreat (baby) no surrender". He belts it out with passion. I feel that is where I am at with the Bronco Engine Transplant, I cannot retreat now and I am going forward without surrendering!

This week was a major milestone in this project. Yesterday, the old engine was removed from the Bronco. My dad came over and helped me. I spent a day and a half disconnecting everything, draining fluids and rigging the lifting gear. The final lift went OK. Since I was trying to take a "path of least resistance", I did not remove all the peripheral components on the engine. And some things like the exhaust crossover were virtually impossible to remove. Another consideration was for the buyer of the engine, he could see where everything was. It was a tight squeeze, but with some jocking around with the lifting gear, we finally got it out. The only casualty was the distributor cap broke when it was pinched against the firewall.

Today was spent removing the wiring harness(most of which I cannot use), the motor mounts (very difficult to remove) and cleaning parts. The buyer of the old engine is driving over from Yakima on Saturday. I advertised it on Craigslist and he seems really excited about buying it.

Now that the engine is out, I can measure where the new engine will be be placed and can start work on installing the radiator and build the new wire harness. I hope to install the new engine next week for the fit test. That will just be to check the fit and design some of the new installations around the engine.
Here is the old V6 engine being rolled out of the garage. No retreat now!
And waiting for the new owner.
The empty engine compartment.
Now I have to clean out the engine compartment of 27 years of accumulated grime.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good work, getting it out as easily as you did. The Bronco doesn't look that bad in the photos so the clean up should go pretty smoothly.

Dan said...

The gunk on the crossmember is really thick. Simple Green does a good job of breaking up the junk.

Daniel Edward Noe said...

Nice job on the B2. I'm doing a 302 swap in my Bronco 2 right now. Just wondering if you could tell me what kind of transmission and transfer case you decided to go with? I've read so many different choices, i can't choose.