Engine swap this weekend. Pics :(

[Rkt Ship]

As the title says I swapped out my engine and also the trans today as one unit. I'll tell a little back story first.

I am around 130000 miles and I realized I was having some head gasket issues back in september. Had some combustion gasses in the coolant. Didn't have any overheating issues as long as I topped off the radiator every 2 weeks or so. So I started pricing out head gaskets and all the other little this and that's and the total was adding up quick so I decided to look for a used engine to see how much and they were decently cheap.

Then I stumbled on Rival Autosports for sale and I was like omg the whole drivet rain for 700. That's awesome. So I got with Rival and after jumping through tons of customs hoops(Rival was awesome through the whole process) the engine showed up a few weeks ago.

Well I had a bunch of things planned tis the season and whatnot. So much so I was unable to set aside a weekend to get everything swapped out. Well fast forward to last friday (2 days ago) and I was driving into work and the red light turned on. Then turned off. Thinking the fans were cooling enough for me to get to the next exit I kept going. If the light turned back on I'd pull over. Well I pull off on the exit and boo. The car shuts off.....apparently the coolant was so low that the temp sensor had stopped sensing the hot coolant and had shut the light off. Well I got the car towed 60 miles home and started my quest of installing a new engine.

Thanks to rival not cracking apart the engine Trans combo it's not as scary as swapping everything in individually. Most of the stuff is straightforward. Just unplug and label. The hardest stuff was the stupid wireloom holders all over the place. There were a couple of hidden plugs under the intake manifold and the downstream 02 sensor that is held in place under the shift cables on the trans. A little note about the linkage removal: all you have to do is take a pair of needle nose pliers under the caps and pull up. They will release. Don't do what I did and pull off the caps...they are friction welded together so I had to go get some plastic glue to put them back together.

After you get everything apart you pull the half shafts which is as easy as removing the castle nuts then using a pry bar at the transmission side. You don't have to pull the radiator but I was swapping it as well and that's pretty easy as well. There are 6 bolts on the front rad support and once you remove those you can pull out the front support. I layed it across the windshield with the hood latch still attached.

After all that I actually took it out the top. I had I tended to just drop it onto the ground then lift the car up but since the radiator as out it was pretty easy bringing it out the top. Then putting everything back in is as some and just reattaching everything.

I know thus is a crappie writeup but if anybody has any questions I can gladly answer them. Basically for 700 dollars I got a drivet rain with 100000 less miles which cost almost as much as the stuff I needed to replace the headgasket.