Shrinking Engine

I’ve been focusing more time the past few weeks in order to get the welding repairs done before winter sets in. I’ll have to put the engine back on wheels and up on the trailer for the trip to/from the machine shop that will be doing the repairs. The plan is to strip it down to just the base for that trip so the cylinders need to come off. Before doing that, the exhaust manifold needs to come off. Before doing that, I had to remove that four broken bolts that held on the exhaust end plates.

The broken bolts were drilled and multiple attempts were made with a big screw extractor. Didn’t budge. So I had to drill out as big as possible without nicking the threads then hand grind with a Dremel and a carbide bit to get even closer.  At that point I could carefully cut the threads with a tap to extract the last remains of the old bolt.  It took two nights but now good to go with no damage to the manifold.

Next up was removing the manifold itself. This only took a few minutes. I had been hitting the nuts with penetrating oil for nearly a year and they came off without a fight. Not sure how I made it this far in life without a crane. Angels were singing.