33 - Engine Disassembly, pt. 3

Who puts things into the mail system during a postal strike (yeah, remember that happened?) over the Christmas holidays? I do, apparently. 

No one ever accused me of intelligence.

At any rate, my timing tools arrived from 3 Brothers and I was able to start work on removing the next components that needed to come off -- the high pressure injection pump, camshaft gear, and the crankshaft gear. 

The special tool kit is supposed to come with all the tools needed to do this, but it doesn't, unfortunately. In particular, there's no removal tool for the camshaft gear and I could not get the puller for the crankshaft gear to line up, no matter what I did. 

Land Rover, in their design of this engine, figured there might be problems taking these components out, so they left some tapped holes in the gears. That's handy, I guess, as it will allow me to make up a few homebrew tools to get these components out. 

I started with the thing I could do: using the special tool to get the injector pump at TDC so that it could be secured and removed. The 200tdi overhaul manual shows that there's a bolt on the injector pump which can be tightened to secure the shaft so it won't rotate from TDC. I followed this procedure and removed the pump. 

Here's hoping that 1) it doesn't move; and 2) I'll find some way to clean up this part without getting dirt and grime anywhere inside its delicate and precise operating works. Yolo.

On to the crank gear. First, you release the tension on the idler pulley and remove that. Straightforward and simple, just as per the manual. Then, immediately garbage the timing belt because it's unknown and contaminated with oil. Then you direct your efforts to removing the timing gears. I started with the one on the crank. It took some figuring, for sure. 

Here's what I ended up with:

The... boss? Tool disc thing? Whatever? Is supposed to, I guess, sit on the end of the crankshaft and allow you to get some bolts through it and into the tapped holes on the gear. No bolts are included. 

So off to Alder Auto in Port Kells I went, to buy some M4 (iirc) long cap-head bolts that would connect the puller disc-thing to the gear. 

It's not pretty, but it worked! There is some twist in the whole assembly, of course, but you can hold it with your hand and apply outboard pressure to the gear with the puller bolt. Et voila, it came off. 

The gear looks okay and, most importantly, the race where the crank seal runs looks pretty smooth. I think this part can be reused. That's a nice win, I guess. 

The crankshaft looks pretty bad in the photo, but it's actually decent. I think some emery cloth will work wonders at cleaning up the part for use again. 

This left me the problem of removing the camshaft timing gear. In the timing tool kit it *looks* like you should be able to use the disc / boss thing to pass some bolts through and pop the sucker right off. 

But, try as I might, I could not get the puller boss / disc to line up with the holes on the cam gear. I really struggled with this. You know how it is: after an hour spent fiddling with the thing, you're convinced you're an idiot because there's no way that the tool maker would include a tool that just doesn't work to do what it's supposed to do. It'd be crazy, right? 

After a significant amount of frustrating time I said fuckit, and decided to make my own puller. 

Yep. It's super ugly. I know! Thanks for thinking that, right along with me. Getting the holes lined up and drilled is remarkably difficult with hand tools. Apparently, a drill press would be handy. I don't have one, so a significant amount of fiddling with drill bits was required to get it to line up enough to be useful. 

But it worked. 

Which finally resulted in me having a disassembled timing chest.

All of this is so frustrating because the timing kit comes with the M6 bolts you need to put into the gear. But the holes & slots they fit through on the puller disc don't line up with the gear!

Or, it's possible I'm an idiot. But, like I said, I spent a lot of time doing shapes and it never quite lined up for me. 

Whatever. The gears came off with my homemade POS tool. So, next up, let's pop the timing chest / front cover off and take a look at the block:

Here it is. You can see the gold paint from LR. 

The cam and crank shafts should now be removeable, leaving me at the goal of this phase of the project -- a stripped engine block I can take to the machine shop, along with the head, for cleaning and machining in prep for rebuild. 

You can see the camshaft retaining plate in the photo above. We'll get to that task another day. 

Of quick note are three things that are left behind in the block which you can see in the photo above: there are two staked bolts / screws that I've not touched; and a washer at the very bottom left of the photo for a "jockey pulley clamp bolt." I have no idea what that is, but it appears to be a sticker. I've left it for the moment. 

Remember how I said that if you don't use antifreeze in your cooling system, you get rust? 

Yeah, that's what it looks like. You can see where the water level was. And you'll also most likely end up with a snapped off threaded section of bolt (or stud, I can't remember what I broke earlier) stuck in your block. 

The way to deal with this is to weld a nut on the end of the threaded section so that you can use a socket to get the stuck bolt out. Basically, just re-make a bolt! This took me a few attempts (four? five?) but I did manage to get the snapped off bolt out, saving me from paying the machine shop to do it. Much heat, penetrating oil, and a few attempts at welding nuts on were required. 

Clearly also, after cleaning and repainting the block the threads will obviously have to be re-tapped. 

Finally, on to the last two major things to remove! The camshaft and the crankshaft, as well as the small internal components like the piston oil squirters. But first, another trip to the store because I don't have the 12-point sockets necessary to remove the bearing caps or big end bolts. 

It's always something, isn't it?