I had good Friday off of work and was able to work in the garage most of the day. I started by pulling the front section of the carpet. More rust was discovered:
The carpet padding was soaked with water. So this is a bit more than surface rust. I continued pulling apart the dashboard and the engineer in me nerded out a little bit. For one, the speakers in the dash had two mounting locations so that the same dashboard base could be used with different interiors in the Pontiac Trans Sport and Oldsmobile Silhouette sister vans.
Or this last bit of the windshield defroster vents. It has a rectangular chamber just before the exhaust (it's horizontal in this picture) that has two ports on it. These ports are connected by a flexible tube that loops around the vent. I'm assuming that it exists to quiet some resonant frequency or something.
And finally the blend doors in the HVAC system are all vacuum operated. The whole thing was plumbed up with multiple colors of tube that ran to this electrically controlled manifold.
Some of these might be old news to other people, but I'm a mechanical engineer at heart. I love tearing apart things to see how they work and seeing the different solutions that other engineers create to solve the same problem. Anyways, after finding all of the hidden screws I managed to pull out the dashboard and the HVAC system. This left me with a gaping hole in the firewall.
It gave me some really handy access to the pinch bolt on the steering shaft. That was the last bolt that I needed to remove before dropping the subframe. Since I don't have a car lift I had to get creative with how to drop the whole engine/transmission/subframe/suspension assembly. I started by hooking the engine crane up and supporting the assembly.
Then I pulled the four bolts holding the subframe and dropped the assembly down onto the legs of the engine crane.
Next I got the floor jack under the engine, lifted it off of the crane, and put the front tires under the subframe so that I could get my jack back out.
I was able to slowly jack up the body of the van up off of the engine.
It just barely cleared after I pulled the engine cover and the alternator.
I then woke the lawn mower from it's slumber to yank the whole thing out from under the van. It's old, but keeps on ticking.
I managed to pull the engine far enough forward that I can drop the van body back down, but not so far forward that I can't close the garage door.
Until next time.