Re: Astro Van Engine Swap
Yes sir this is gonna be a fun one, lol. Originally I had planned on putting the sub-frame on moving dollies and sliding out the side after It was unbolted. Then I though maybe I would just attach some caster directly to the sub-frame. However as it stands I plan to lower the body onto "something" then move the cherry picker out of the way and roll it out the front on it's own tires(with a jack on the back of the sub-frame. The problem with this is, what i had planned to set the body on isn't gonna work as planned. So we had to improvise at the last minute, it now consists of one 55 gallon drum in the center on body cross support(it actually held by itself but I didn't trust it), and we also added two jackstands on top of two cinder blocks in an area that the sub-frame used to reside.
I don't think I'm doing that great of job detailing this extraction but for anyone planning on doing this it is pretty straight forward. You can compare my pics to what you see in front of you to get a better idea of what I removed. The biggest pain so far was(finding and removing) a few brackets that held the fuel lines to the engine and transmission. The wiring harness will go with the sub-frame, however I left the ac lines(because of the rear heat/ac) attached to the body. The problem with that was the harness was wrapped around the rear ac line so I had to remove a bunch of the connectors on the underside to be able to flop them around the ac line. Well here's some more pics.
This is what it looked like under the hood with everything ready to drop.
You can see the wiring harness tha was attached to the firewall stuffed down in there.
After playing around with a few ideas, this is what we came up with to lift the body.
Well it's up, now what, lol!?!