I had told Chris that I would have the engine ready to pull when he got there. I lied. I had depressurized the fuel system and I had removed the hood by myself (a feat by itself). I also drained the coolant out of the car, but that was pretty much as far as I had gotten with it. So the first thing that we did was start looking to see what needed to be undone to remove the old engine. We had decided that we were going to remove the engine and transmission assembly together, so that meant pulling the axles and disconnecting the shift linkages and the clutch hydraulic line as well as all of the wiring harnesses that surrounded the engine. Fortunately, there is one main wiring harness that runs the fuel aspect of the engine and a wiring harness that runs over top of the transmission to run the cooling system and to keep tabs on the emissions. So we disconnected those two harnesses, a few random engine grounds, and the vehicle speed sensor and reverse indicator sensor on the transmission (transaxle? for FWD vehicles...I like transmission). If only removing an engine were that easy...
As I mentioned, to remove the transmission with the engine, we had to pull the axles out of the transmission housing. Typically this is pretty easy; remove the wheels, unbolt the lower spindle bolt that holds the ball joint into the spindle, pry the ball joint out and the axle pretty much pulls out of the transmission (you want to drain the transmission fluid before this step, otherwise you'll be covered with heavy oil that smells of onion or garlic...its the sulfur additives in the oil). My Focus in its 112202 mile glory had/has never had new ball joints installed (I guess the passenger's side appeared to have been replaced at some point, since it was bolted instead of riveted) and as a result, we bent a 4 foot 1" thick solid steel pry bar attempting to pop the ball joints out of the spindle. Time for Plan B: We loosened the upper spindle bolt that holds the strut and freed the spindle from the constraints of suspension geometry. Then we popped the nuts off the rear tie rods to get a little more articulation. At that point, we managed just enough clearance to pull the axles out of the transmission. Alright, now onto the easy part...
There are three motor mounts that need to be removed in order to pull the engine. Two are readily accessible from the top of the engine, but the third (AKA, the "Dog Bone", due to its shape) is at the bottom, rear of the engine (actually bolted to the transmission). Obviously, this is the one you want to take out first, since you don't want to be underneath an engine without any support aside from a hydraulic jack from China via RKO. Upon removal of this motor mount, an odd assortment of rocks were found to be hiding behind the mount. It wasn't the only collection of rocks that we found (mostly gathered in suspension areas, helping set preload)...that's the joy of having spent the first several years of its life living on a gravel driveway. Fortunately, the dog bone came out with minimal fuss. We're starting to get into areas where I had worked within the last several years, so bolts were getting easier to remove. We pulled the engine hoist up to the car and hooked onto the two hooks on the engine. Once we drew up all the slack on the chain, we went to work on the motor mounts. Chris took the driver's side and I took the passenger's side. Within 5 minutes we were ready to lift.
At this point it was about 3:30 and Brett (a local guy) had shown up after work to see how things were going. He had plans for the evening, but was able to stay for about 30 minutes to help out. Which was fortunate, because we started lifting, and the clearances for everything got really tight. I manned the hoist, while Chris and Brett watched as I lifted. If there was an alignment issue, one of them would push on the engine until we cleared. We pulled the engine with all of the accessories attached, which reduced the amount of room that we had to play with on the periphery. It took us about 40 minutes to get the engine freed from the bay. We ended up lowering the passenger's side of the car a little bit so that we didn't have to lift the engine quite so high.
At this point, we pulled the engine to the side, lowered it to waist height and started removing the alternator and power steering pump, as well as the cam gears. I had made a last minute decision that I wasn't going to try to leave the A/C installed on the new engine. This engine is built to turn the wheels, not an A/C compressor. We quickly swapped the accessories over to the new engine, timed it with the cam gears installed and went to put the serpentine belt on. Unfortunately, the two piece under-drive pulley kit that I had bought did not work for cars without A/C, because the waterpump pulley was an overdrive pulley and the belt would have worn against itself on start up. So, we swapped the overdrive pulley off of the car, put the stock pulley on from the other engine and headed for Autozone to pick up a new belt that fit. Generally when you go to Autozone, the person behind the counter will look at you with a blank stare until you tell them year, make and model. You can't just tell them what size belt you need. Fortunately, we found an above average employee who understood part numbers well enough to find us a 74" belt. We took that home and tried it, but it was just a little bit too short. So another trip to Autozone and we found a 75.5" belt that did the trick nicely.
Next, we lowered the old engine the whole way to the floor and started unbolting the transmission. Ford for some reason decided to use 13 bolts to hold the transmission onto a Zetec engine, but only uses 6 bolts to hold the transmission onto a 460 truck engine. Go figure...Anyhow, the transmission came off without too much hassle. Then we lifted the engine back up, moved it out of the way and took it off the hoist. The new engine went on, we bolted up the new, lightweight flywheel, aligned the clutch and pressure plate and got ready to slide the transmission back in place. By about 11PM on Friday, we had the old engine out and the new engine ready to go in.
We got a bit of an earlier start on the project Saturday. I woke up around 7AM and decided that I would try to install the revised tune onto my flasher. I had accidentally given my tuner the wrong serial number for my flasher, so I couldn't load the tune. We got out into the garage, wandering around by 8:30AM. I started removing the A/C components, like the condensor and the A/C cooler (AKA radiator). After that, we lifted the new engine up and slid it into the engine bay. Without the A/C compressor attached to the engine, we had an additional 6" of room, so it dropped in much easier. We bolted up the top two motor mounts and started reconnecting harnesses, grounds, hydraulic lines and shift linkages. By about 10AM, Brian, Devon and Megan showed up to lend a hand as well. Once they showed up, they kind of realized that the majority of the work had been finished and it was just a matter of buttoning things up, like reconnecting the exhaust and re-installing the axles. Throughout the morning, I kept trying to call my tuner to get the issue straightened out, since we were hoping to fire the car up by evening. I finally got ahold of someone at the shop around 12:30 and he said that everyone had gone to the local drag strip for the day and I'd have to call back on Monday.
Everyone who had come to help left around 2 or 3 in the afternoon, once the majority of things were finished up. Chris stayed and helped me straighten up the garage and get our tools sorted out. By 5:15, we decided that we could probably get away with starting the engine with the tune that was installed on the computer, as long as we didn't run it too long and we just let it idle. So, we cranked it a few times to get fuel pressure, then I turned the key and it fired right up. It sat and idled, but was making a little bit of noise, so we were afraid that it was running too much spark and was detonating, so we shut it off and pushed it over into the corner of the garage.
On Monday, being rather antsy, I called the tuner several times to see if they had time to straighten my tune out. I spent a little time in the morning checking that I had oil pressure, that the timing was right and that the valves weren't hitting the pistons. The tuner was really busy, so he didn't have a chance to get the tune straightened out until almost 6PM. He emailed it over and I loaded it onto the car. The car fired right up, so I took a look around the engine bay. It was still making a little noise, but I wasn't too concerned about it. I took it out and broke the cams in at 3000 RPMs for ~30 minutes. I got back to the house, changed the oil and the noise went away. After taking the oil to be recycled (and a little detour), I put the car away for the night. I had to get miles on the car Tuesday, because we were busy Wedneday and I was scheduled for tuning on Thursday. By Wednesday night, I only managed to put about 180 miles on the car. I had hoped to have 500 at least. Oh weell...I changed the oil and set my alarm for 2:30AM...It was going to be a long day Thursday...
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