The teardown continues

Oscar and I continued the process of dismantling the LTD this morning.

First off, drained the cooling system and removed the radiator.

Second, remove the exhaust. Overjoyed to find that the nuts on the stud came off easily (not snapping).

Next was to begin the process of removing the engine. The Haynes manual has a fairly short list of steps for this, but each one refers to one or more other chapters. In some cases, this was a little recursive:

…

Remove air filter box

Remove carburettors

…

On reading the section on removing the air filter box, it turned out that the carburettors needed to be removed first. But the carburettors were extremely difficult to budge with the air filter box. Argh! Horrible job, ending up with basically brute force to lever them free of the intakes on the engine and the air filter box. I think I shall investigate using pod filters instead when we rebuild it (probably needs rejetting etc if we do).

Discovered that the choke cable was totally shot, so that’s one more think that will need replacing.

After fighting the carbs off we called it a day and bagged everything up in ziplock bags and labelled them. Next time, I hope to get the rest of the engine out.