More connections broken

After a break for Passover I found a couple of hours to continue with the preparations for pulling the engine. First up were the hoses carrying the coolant from the engine to the heater core in the passenger compartment and then back.



In a gas car nearly 80% of the energy produced by burning the gas goes into creating heat (and noise) and not into moving the car - at least you get warm toes for free :). With no ICE (Internal combustion engine ... not the cold stuff :)) to provide heat, I'm going to have to do something else when the car is converted since at a minimum I need to be able to defog the windshield and, since I drive top-down all year round, a bit of heat to my toes IS quite nice.

While I would have liked to do everything by the book, since there are quite a few items not going back into service in the car I'm willing to take a few shortcuts ... literally. The heater hoses refused to come loose by normal means so, in the interests of expediency out came a saw and, ooops, the hoses are now disconnected.



While I was there, time to remove the ground wire connecting the engine to the chassis.



At the front of the engine, there are some wiring harnesses which I assume connect sensors back to the car's ECU.



So they get disconnected.



Along the back of the engine, more wiring harnesses for the ignition system and other sensors.



They are now gone.



That was all reasonably successful and quick so time to tackle the connection to the exhaust system again. The advice I had received from the person buying the engine from me was to disconnect the downpipe at the catalytic converter and pull it with the engine as one piece. Simple enough, eh? Well not so fast. After 17 years exposed to the elements under the car (moisture from road spray and lots of heat) I was amazed at how little corrosion there was on the exhaust system. Well apart from the nuts connecting the cat to the down pipe :(.



The leverage I could get with my 14mm wrench would not budge either nut. One trick I had picked up from reading conversion blogs (I can't remember where or I'd give credit) was to link 2 wrenches together to get more leverage.



That allowed me to loosen the nut on the driver's side a couple of turns but it seized up again and would not budge and for the life of me I still couldn't move the other one. Time to think again.

Thinking I might have a similar problem removing the driveshaft where it connected to the differential I thought I'd better find that out sooner than later so I headed to the other end of the car. Much to my surprise the 4 bolts back there came off with no trouble.



Time for a break for the evening.