I'm beat...R&R 7.3 diesel.

I've pulled engines before. A bunch of them.

I've even pulled and replaced quite a few transmissions.

This is my first 7.3 diesel. It's in a friends truck. It was leaking pretty much everywhere. Yesterday was remove and start cleaning.

Today was reseal and start installation. It got new front and rear main seals, oil pan, valve covers, all high pressure oil line seals, and fuel line seals. That took a lot longer than I thought it would.

Damn that thing is heavy.

Most of the front of the truck has to come off.

It had been leaking a while. Nasty doesn't even begin to describe it.

So much for that clean shop.

The oil pickup looks like a sewer line. Huge. The rods also aren't very small.

Wiring harness under the valve covers. Yep, they got replaced too.

All cleaned and sealed. Ready for install.

At 4pm, it was sitting back where it belongs. Transmission bolted up and everything on the bottom side completed. Ready to finish the install in the morning.

I'm getting too old for this. By the end of tomorrow I should be mostly dead.

You forgot to put it in the bus.

In reply to HappyAndy:

After being up close and personal with a 7.3 International diesel. I'm pretty sure I'll be holding out for a Cummins with a mechanical injection system.

Why didn't you pull the cab?

In reply to markwemple:

You don't have to on the 2000 trucks, and we would have still had to pull the engine to reseal the oil pan and rear main.

In reply to markwemple: Pretty sure doing the oil pan they would have pulled the motor regardless.

I would have just kept a extra gallon of oil in the cab before going through all that....

MattW wrote: I would have just kept a extra gallon of oil in the cab before going through all that....

He started there, but it's been losing 2+ quarts a week for the last month or so. That adds up pretty quickly.

Toyman01 wrote:

MattW wrote: I would have just kept a extra gallon of oil in the cab before going through all that....

He started there, but it's been losing 2+ quarts a week for the last month or so. That adds up pretty quickly.

Not if you just pour your used oil back in. BTDT

I once got a sweet deal on like 70qts of oil from a gas station switching ownership. I ran through it all in one summer of a leaking front main seal i didn't feel like fixing. I finally replaced that seal AFTER i had installed that engine in a DIFFERENT car, after the engine was installed again, but before starting the car. And immediately after i fixed that and ran the car, the cam seal failed and i replaced that too. Keeping in mind both of these are behind a timing belt.

Sometimes logic doesn't play into the choices we make.

Reminds me. I really need to por 15 my 7.3 pan.

MattW wrote: In reply to markwemple: Pretty sure doing the oil pan they would have pulled the motor regardless.

And on the Duramax, you have to remove the lower oil pan before you pull the engine or you won't have enough room to sneak it past the front axle. Setting the engine back in with the fragile oil pickup waggling in the breeze ready to get mangled is nerve-wracking.

Knurled tip: Those little mini oil drains are like $12-15 and always seem to be just the right size to not catch some of the drips. Go to Home Depot and get a shallow cement mixing tub for $6. It's much larger, about the same depth, and it's thicker plastic so you don't punch a hole in it the first time you drop a 3rd-member into it.

Wow, never seen a 7.3 PSD pulled before. Congrats on getting that done in 3 days - it took me about 10 months to do the same on a 1st gen RAV4 (don't ask).

I get the impression it is too late now, it may be worth replacing the up-pipes while the engine is out. From what I understand it is a fairly miserable job in the truck.

Man I hope he paid you something for that, otherwise you're a WAY better friend than me. I don't even help people move anymore, but that's mainly because some of my friends just started getting insane with their requests.

Done and done.

R&R, including resealing, 20 hours. Not too shabby for a couple of amateurs.

Impressive!

Since no one else has asked,why the bell? To tap out, or for signalling the bell lap when the end is in sight?

In reply to XLR99:

The bell is actually a light. I keep a LED flood in one of those for general lighting under the hood.

In reply to Cotton:

The friend in question is a finish carpenter. I'm getting ready to do some work on the house, he's paying back hours with hours.

In reply to markwemple: That's a pretty fantastic idea for the 302 in my '96 F-150. It doesn't leak yet, so it must not be too late. It's probably a bad idea to knock the scale off it with a wire brush at this point!

Toyman01 wrote: In reply to Cotton: The friend in question is a finish carpenter.

Did you have to go to Finland, or did he ship the truck?

I'm so sorry. :)