With all of the tasks to do around the homestead it might seem overwhelming. Especially when I want to get to certain tasks done more sooner than later, it might seem daunting when certain jobs need to be done to comfortably complete another job. In this case we're referring to the stripping of the crushed Chevy Tracker, especially the engine, in order to swap it out into the new Tracker body (which also requires the removal of the bad engine it contains). Because the Dodge is still in the garage and there's a few things I still need to do to the car to ready it to be able to sit outside in any weather, I can't bring either of the Trackers up to the garage to pull the engines out. Since I really want to get the Tracker problem resolved more sooner than later, even if I'm still working on the Dodge, I decided to just jump the gun. I reverted back to how I used to do things before the garage was set up. I staged the engine crane in a level solid spot and rolled the Tracker over the crane to stage it for the engine removal. I removed the hood from the Tracker then spent a minute pulling things loose from the engine. Other stuff around the engine was disconnected as well. The AC hoses, condenser, radiator, air cleaner and a host of other items around the engine were removed. I also removed the headlight housings, grille, bumper and battery, just to clear some room around the engine itself. With everything cleared from around the engine, I continued to disconnect everything associated with the engine. The exhaust pipe, tranny lines, shifter linkage, engine mounts, tranny mounts, driveshaft, all wiring, hoses, etc, were disconnected. After a couple of hours I had everything disconnected from the engine and plenty of room cleared that I was able to get the engine crane balancer hooked up and secured to the factory engine hoist loops on the engine. I lifted the engine partway from the cradle of the engine compartment so I can balance the whole engine/tranny combo prior to removal. Now since the Tracker has had some patchwork done to the front internal structure that holds the radiator and other hardware, I had decided that it would be way easier to just cut the substructure from the front, opening the front of the vehicle up to allow me to just pull the engine straight out from the front. I had to cut the damaged metal and straighten everything out prior to re-welding the substructure to be able reattach things like the headlight housings, radiator, condenser, AC hoses, etc. Besides, since this body is destined for the junkyard anyway, it really doesn't matter if I hack up the body more to facilitate fast and easy removal of the engine and transmission. Now from what I've observed, removing the engine and transmission in unison will be very problematic if I have to pull the combo from the top of the engine compartment due to the relatively short length of said engine compartment. More than likely I'm going to have to try to remove just the engine from the transmission of the new Tracker and just replace the engine instead of trying to pull everything out. Hopefully the transmission in the new Tracker is good so I don't have to worry about trying to remove it later on from underneath the truck. Another thing that went on was the splitting of a bunch of stacked logs that I had staged along the driveway. This job was taken on by the wife since I was working on the Tracker at the same time. Using the log splitter, she was able to split a shitload of wood in the same two hours that it took me to disassemble the Tracker. I did have to stop my work on occasion to cart a wheelbarrow load of logs to her worksite so she can continue to split logs but other than that, work moved pretty smoothly. With the amount of wood that was stacked by the log splitter, we should be able to finish filling the firewood shed and will probably fill a good portion of the pallet that's staged in front of the firewood shed. Even with all of this wood that's been "processed", we've still got a lot of wood to still cut down into small pieces to split later plus the next door neighbor has three trees that need to be cut up (they're already on the ground) and hauled to our staging spots along the driveway so they can be split later on. Again there will be a enough wood to keep us supplied for at least two winters, probably three. I'll need to lay down a couple more pallets most likely to accommodate all of this extra wood. We'll soon see.
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May 2023
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