My first engine swap!

[Kixwy2]

Ok, the back story:

I bought my truck about 5 months ago and pretty much knew nothing about fixing trucks... I never even changed my own oil so this has been a total learning experience from the top down. Started with small stuff like changing the steering wheel and seats, and snowballed into minor tuneups, rebuilding carbs, and finally needing a new motor when troubleshooting showed that my cam lobes were bad.

Thanks to some awesome advice on the forums here and some good friends willing to work for food and beer, I put in a new motor this week!


We started on Sunday, (me, my buddies Tom and Jerry - no joke) and pulled out everything from the engine. Easy things were the stuff on top, obviously, but with the PO's modifications and some odd placement, we hit a snag when we came to the water pump/alternator/fan area. Finally got that out once we realized there wasn't enough clearance unless we took out the radiator... Great, but the starter and fuel pump couldn't come out with the old motor thanks to the headers, so out they went too. We were just about ready to disconnect the tranny and yank the motor when we found out the pump on the hoist had leaked out its fluid. So that was another couple of troubleshooting hours. We were able to get the motor out and on the engine stand before we gave up for the night. Of course, we had to ratchet strap the tranny and the headers up and push the truck out of the garage because we had to clean up our Exxon Valdez oil spill mess...





Tom and I came back on Tuesday when the new engine finally showed up. We pulled the intake manifold off the old engine and what a mess. I can't believe it was even running. The valves are coated in black goo, almost every port is covered to the point of closure with some brownish gunk - we didn't even pull the cam shaft out.









Yesterday the three of us got the new engine in but it would have been a lot easier with a pivot point on the hoist. You can see from the pics it was just straight chain so we did a lot of grunting and shoving and cursing. The headers were pretty much the bane of our existence... couldn't shove them out of the way, then when we got them out of the way we couldn't bring them back to line up with the bolt holes. Then the front set of exhaust headers have a 120 degree curve to them which makes it almost impossible to get bolts in. We cursed at that for a couple hours and then called it a day before we killed each other...



Went to the parts store and picked up a new set of header bolts to make this go faster. Got the headers bolted in after a bit more swearing, and then put the front back together. We flushed the radiator and put that back in, then finally got the distributor in and wired.

It started on the third key turn!!!

It sounds SO good - I let it run for about 30 min to break it in a bit and watch for problems. There's a bolt loose on the smog air pump that hits the pulley and make a clattering noise, I dumped out the power steering fluid somehow from the reservoir, and the lower radiator hose isn't tight enough so it leaks. Well ok, it blew off and dumped hot water all over my nice clean motor. But easy fixes to take care of after this weekend. I will be so happy to have a clean, well running truck after this!