Saturday, November 23, 2013

The One Where The Eagle Loses Some Weight

It turns out that the parts stores don't loan out air tools. So I picked up a cheap one, thinking that now all my wildest dreams would come true. Problem was, the air ratchet, while it was more maneuverable, didn't have nearly enough torque to get the last two nuts off of the adapter housing. It also rounded off one of them pretty badly, because the lever kept getting pressed unavoidably by a nearby part. Air ratchet FAIL.

The above-mentioned adapter housing is the part near the top of the photo, where you can see a few of the bolts holding it on.

The rest is the transfer case. You can see my size 11 shoe near the bottom for scale. This thing is properly huge. (The transfer case, not my foot.)

At long last, I have slain the beast. 
Getting it detached from the transmission and out safely (yes, all digits are unscathed) was... harder than it probably needed to be. After realizing that the last two nuts were definitely not coming off of the adapter housing while it was on the car, I decided to take it off along with the transfer case. The adapter housing attaches to the back of the transmission with 6 bolts, none of which, luckily, were terminally stuck.
Once those were off, I inched the transfer case back little by little on its precarious press-board platform, supported by the questionable hydraulic jack setup from two entries ago. It got hung up on a couple of things, including the exhaust system and the transmission output shaft. But finally, after probably a half-hour struggle, it was out.

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