32 - Engine Disassembly, pt. 2

Onwards.

Let's start with some maintenance, shall we? First up, I figured I'd try and recover the crank bolt; my reasoning was that I'd need the bolt to turn the crankshaft in the future for disassembly, and it'd sure be easier to use a socket than the slotted... thing.

All I had to do was get the tack welds to fail *just enough* to whack them free with a hammer. Not too difficult, though quite irritating. Once again, I have to ask myself: who does this? 

At least now I have a shortened crank bolt that I can use normally. It'll come in handy later. 

Now to tidy up some slime, starting with the oil pan:

Not for the first time do I wish I owned a parts washer. I'm sure it'd make this job at least a little easier. As it is, I have to buy off-the-shelf solvents and use them with wire brushes and lots of blue shop towels. This is an inefficient and kinda expensive method. The wire brushes quickly get gunked up and become sorta useless. After a while, you're basically just spreading oil around. 

My method is to get as much of the 'lumber' off as I can, then move to more aggressive degreasers. I've found oven cleaner works okay, so it's something I use once there's a reasonable chance it'll come in contact with the surface of the part. I'm sure this is probably bad both for my health AND the part I'm trying to clean, but I haven't found anything that works better, particularly on aluminum. 

My goal with the oil pan is to get it clean enough that I can take it in and sandblast it (yet another tool I wish I had in my garage.) The plan is to repaint it thereafter. Maybe I'll get it powder coated at the same time as the wheels...

Next step is to work on the front cover of the timing chest. To do that, you have to get the crank pulley off first. Mine wasn't too difficult to remove, as you may recall from my previous post, so that was at least something positive. The harmonic balancer, however, would prove to be a much more challenging opponent. 

As you can see in the photo above, I had to use my puller on it. I'm not a fan of using pullers like this. They are always sketchy: these pullers aren't exactly structurally solid. They only work in one 'direction,' if you will, and don't tolerate misalignment very well. Couple that with the force that's needed to break free something like a rusted-on harmonic balancer and it gets squirrely. During this project I have frequently had to really crank on the puller bolt to free a part and every time I do, I always cringe. First, because it's super sketchy! The whole thing could slip; if it's not perfectly centred / aligned, it'll fly off. Second, the amount of force going on this part is significant. It could bend or shatter.

I had to use a ton of heat from the MAPP torch and way more torque on the puller bolt than I was comfortable with but it did eventually start to slowly move. As someone once said, once the part starts to move, you've usually won. 

And here we go. You can't see the keyed sleeve smoking here, but it was. 

I don't know how 'repairable' these parts are. They're made of steel sleeve, surrounded with hard rubber. One imagines that they become brittle and oil-impregnated over time and lose performance. This is an expensive part. It'd be nice to save it, if possible.  

Let's take a look at the crankshaft.

It's pretty obvious that the crank seal has been leaking. Surely not much of a surprise. It doesn't *look* too bad at first glance?

Hmm. There's the corrosion I was fighting, earlier. 

I've heard / seen that you can clean this up with emery cloth and re-use. I'll attempt to do this, I think, provided the crankshaft is in otherwise good condition. I'd obviously prefer not to have to buy a new one if it can be avoided. 

Let's whiz off the bolts holding on the front cover and see what we have next, shall we? 

What we have, here, is a giant mess. A failed crank seal -- and possibly a failed camshaft oil seal -- has rendered the inside of the timing chest an oily splooge. Wunderbar.

But! This is a significant milestone in the engine teardown. Once you have access to the timing components, you are a short distance away from being able to take out the final major assemblies including the crankshaft and camshaft. 

It's now a good time to talk about 'special tools.' These are, just as they say in the title, tools that do something unique on the engine. One of the special tools on the 200tdi is a timing tool. And, at this stage of the teardown, I now have a challenging decision to make. I can just whiz the bolts off of the gears and pull everything apart, assuming that the fuel injector pump will need a rebuild, OR I can put the fuel pump in time at TDC by using the special Land Rover tool. This will mean that I can just (hopefully) pop it back on again and not have to re-time the injector pump.

A quick call to a local shop in Port Kells suggests that a rebuild of the Bosch VE high pressure fuel pump is a $2000 expense so, with some regret, I ordered the timing kit from 3 Brothers. This is not a cheap special tool, but it's essential; I would need one for the put-it-back-together-again phase, anyway. It's the nature of special tools that you only use them for the specific job they're built for. So once, or maybe twice, and that's it. They'll probably sit on the shelf of your garage forever and ever thereafter, collecting dust. I'm kind of bummed that no one on the local Land Rover forums had one I could borrow. Buying special tools is expensive.

Oh well. If anyone needs my 200/300tdi timing tools, hit me up. 

So, with the special tool ordered, I took a look at the front cover. An oily mess, for sure. You can see all the silicone that someone used to try and stop the thing from leaking. This will be a significant cleanup job, for sure. 

Again, a parts washer would sure be handy. But! At least I'm running out of "oily mess" cleanup jobs. With a clean gearbox and axles now done, there's not much left that will be covered in oil. Right? 

One quick note -- you can see all the red rust from the water pump mounting flange of the front cover. I've heard that these ebay engines are often sourced from Africa, where antifreeze isn't really used because it's not needed. Using straight water in your cooling system is cheaper, but not great: there are no anticorrosion additives, so your water pump bearings fail, the inside of the cast iron block rusts like crazy, and you get flakes of rust throughout your cooling system, clogging your radiator. 

There will be more work needed to recover these components, if they're salvageable at all, in the future.