Ed Poore

I could flip the block upside down potentially but that means adjusting my stand. Although I did have a thought of seeing if I could find a cement mixer gearbox to turn it into a gear driven rotary one, would be vastly more useful (possibly). Though by the time I've faffed about doing that I could have just simply spent the time on my knees working on it as is. I built the stand so that I should hopefully have enough space to work on it in this orientation - I'll probably regret that when I come to putting the crank back in and so on but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. Worst case I'll just put a sheet of wood onto my surface table / work bench and just put it upside down on that or on the floor on a pallet and built it up that way.

Perhaps it's not obvious but this isn't a Land Rover engine (Perkins 1004.4 out of my JCB 2CX), the bare block alone weighs the same as a fully dressed Tdi... Our chest freezer is down at -24°C so that should be cold enough for them overnight. It's possible to fit it inside my press (capable of taking something 5ft tall inside and it is just wide enough) but moving around the block is a PITA especially as I'll have to make another frame for it to sit on inside the press. What I plan on doing is tacking a couple of bars to the 30mm plate and that way it can be placed underneath the block on the stand and the same puller that was used to pull it out will be used to pull it in. Another possibility is to weld the box and plates together and drill the base plate (got another large piece of 20mm scrap somewhere, might have some 40mm that's big enough) so that I can clamp it to the head. That's what the special Perkins tool does and basically the puller gets reversed into a pusher. I think I cut the box tall enough to accommodate that setup, if not I've still got 5ft left of this "offcut" from gate-posts or there's always another 15m of it up in the vegetable garden.

Have you seen the size of the boats that he tows around for work?! It'll be welcome for the break.

Was a flex plate and torque converter.

Maybe but then using a fine thread blah blah blah would have helped too. As it was this puller cost me £50 for two bits of bar (used one so far), £15 for the bearing and £4 for the nuts. They happened to all be in stock in the local tractor factors and (hopefully) it's a one off. To date this has saved me about £500 for getting a local engine over haulers / machine shop to extract them so I'm happy with the outcome. It wasn't about building a perfect puller.

Useful to know thanks. To be honest I hadn't considered anything else, it was sprayed on before and during the operation. The main benefit of duck oil is it's a penetrating fluid so gets into all the little nooks and crannies, it's amazing what it will flow into and I've usually found it to be super slippery and helps greatly when it does work it's way in. I guess in this scenario it probably got squeezed out of the relevant bits. Lithium grease may well have worked better if I'd applied it. I dismissed it largely because I didn't want to get it everywhere (the nature of the beast meant the whole setup has to be completely stripped down for assembly into the next liner). To be honest I just started on the first one gently to make sure everything was lined up, cranked it up a bit given I was expecting resistance and then a few second later there was a crack as the seal broke so I cranked it a bit more and it came fairly easily. Removed it to investigate and yup the liner was sliding out. It was really only the last liner that put up a bit of a fight and some of that may have been a slight misalignment in everything as the box section had shifted slightly in the bandsaw as the cut progressed. I may see if I can power up my big mill to machine it flat before pulling the new ones. Although freezing them before hand (from someone who's done it before) means they slide in fairly easily.

Every four turns or so it was getting liberally doused in duck oil. Didn't think of EP90 but duck oil penetrates through tiny gaps and even that wasn't flowing as readily as it normally does through the gap between the thread and the nut. From prior experience duck oil lubricates stuff beautifully as that's what it was designed for. WD40, for example, just evaporates off. Also bear in mind this was just cheap M30 coarse threaded bar which on smaller stuff (M20 for example) I've managed to strip the thread with a normal spanner so doesn't take much to chew it up.

I spoke too soon, #4 was a person I'm not that keen on. Kept fighting for the first half and then realised that the threaded bar had galled up with the zinc plating being stripped off from it so the nut jammed. Cut the bar off and used the seized nut at the bottom of the puller and had just enough to finish the job. Came out easily enough after that and a bit of a rejiggle to keep things nice and straight. I was astonished at how warm the bar got pulling the liners from the forces involved in pulling them out. Shiny bit of steel is the stepped pulled a friend machined up for me.

This mornings project was making a fnerkin big puller, M30 threaded bar, 30mm plate offcut, one bearing a load of nuts and a lump of steel a friend turned down to suit the liners. This afternoon's project has been a workout... Steel box to jam the engine stand against 1.5 tonnes of work bench, aluminium scaffold tube clamped to the stairs sleeving a big adjustable on one of two lock nuts on the bar to stop it rotating and then a 24" pipe wrench on the nut to pull the thread through. The first three liners weren't actually too bad and didn't necessitate all of this faffery but the last liner (#1 piston) has finally just popped so I'm having a cold one before getting dizzy again walking around it lots of circles cranking it out. I think it's about 75 turns given its 3.5mm thread pitch and there's about 10" of liner to pull out.

Can you make up a jig (even timber) to hold the engine and gearbox in the right locations then you can tweak and align things before tacking them all in place.

He'll have already done it by now...

We can't keep up with you as is! [edit]Although if there were two of you maybe one of you could tour the country to help us folk struggling for time with our projects [/edit]

Better than having two of him

No, https://www.woodmagazine.com/woodworking-tips/techniques/joinery/5-ways-to-make-precision-rabbet-cuts

Basically a half lap joint. Can also use biscuits and dominoes

No what's depressing is Stephen made the bit that didn't fit before anyone could blink (the flywheel). When I was thinking of fitting the 1UZ to the Sandringham then I was looking at doing what Stephen had but my lathe wasn't anywhere close to being big enough. Then plans changed and it was being dropped into the Defender and oo look there was an off-the-shelf adapter. I'm drastically time poor(e) at the moment and have been since I moved down here so I had some spare cash and thought why not. Kit arrives - cut off the ring gear from the flex plate and heat it up as Stephen did to drop it on - knock supplied spigot bearing in, bolt up adapter plate find that four bolts are the wrong thread - ah well there's plenty in there for the moment, I can source some later. Right - time to put the flywheel on... Oh... Doesn't fit over the crank - the centre bore is too small. Email Shabs and go through some measurements and the short version is he's adamant that there must be something different with my engine / crank because he's never had an issue before. Hmm., wonder who cocked up a measurement - someone turning out a handful of adapters a year or Toyota who built over 250,000 of them from the 1980s to ~2000. I mean they built 900 prototypes FFS!

I'd do those two the other way around. May not matter for smaller rams but I helped a mate remove one of the main lift rams on his 24t Komatsu (5t Komatsu was at it's limit lowering it down onto the steel trestles). They left the ram attached at the base of the cab and I asked why because I was assuming Duncan was going to take the ram back with him. He said they'd once made a jig in the workshop for undoing the end caps on the big rams bit it was enormous, had to be bolted to the concrete floor and several tonnes of ballast added to it and still struggled sometimes. They learnt it was far easier to leave it attached to a 24t counterbalance than faff with it in the workshop.

No, smooth relentless power, or at least we both hope so...

Don't give him any more mad ideas!

And it didn't fit properly which reminds me I need to pick up the flywheel from the mate who bored out the centre for me...

Versus just drilling and tapping a few extra holes? It has the downside though that you've introduced a "custom" bell housing into the mix to replicate or replace if you need to it would need two more gearboxes.

I think from memory you'd still need to make a spacer because the LR is quite thick and the A340 bell housing drops down in diameter quite quickly so may not offer the necessary clearance.

FFS - you need to be faster at typing / computers. There's little point asking for advice if you've already accomplished the task. You've probably got the engine in as I'm writing this - I know you won't have fired it up because you'll be procrastinating over it as that's electrics

Similar to @Wytze why not CAD (Cardboard-Aided-Design)? Or MDF, basically rough out a shape from MDF or something similar to get the engine side of the mount - if you smear some dirt / grease over the bolt holes (or possibly just hit with a hammer) you can get the locations onto the template. Then flip it over and do the same for the gearbox - this side should be easier because you can centre punch through the bell housing holes. If you were being fancy just grab a load of bolts and turn them down on the lathe into punches - wind them into the engine face and then hold the MDF up against it and thwack it with a hammer to get the centres. You can turn down a dowel that fits into the centre of the crank and sticks out far enough to get the location of the crank as an alignment but that's not that critical because the main shaft of the gearboxes usually have quite a bit of float in them and it's the spigot bearing that holds it in place. If you got a slab of Ali / steel then you could rough it out with a jigsaw (I've used my M18 Jigsaw for cutting through some pretty thick aluminium and it works well - that way you're not wasting a huge amount out of the centre. I don't think the material matters too much because all you're doing is bolting the two bits together and as along as they're strong enough then it's good enough.

Sounds like ours, I've started taking the machete on the tractor with me when I mow the lawns to cut the brambles trying to decapitate me.