Flx pulled ahead of its old power pack, ready for the switch
Flx pulled ahead of its old power pack, ready for the switch |
The two busses were on roughly flat quack-grass covered pastureland, about a 3-minute walk from my shop - meaning most of my tools, and my arc welder. I did have an oxy-acetylene set on wheels, which of course could be brought to bear on the project. I also had 120VAC housecurrent at the site, and my air compressor, also mounted on wheels, was portable as well, I'd had the Flx towed up alongside the schoolie, and had a 4X4 pickup and tow strap available for moving either bus a few feet when necessary. |
First step was to get the power packs out. I did the Flx first.
Next, I laid strips of 2X6 lumber along both sides of the engine, on the ground. These would support the blocks once I got the lump jacked up a bit. The engine was welded solidly into the bus at front and rear - there were no rubber engine mounts - and the gearbox was mounted to the front of the engine with no mounts between it and the bus at all. This meant that, once the driveshaft, parking brake and shift linkage, and the various engine linkages were disconnected, as well as the radiator and heater hoses, etc. the power pack - engine and gearbox - would be free. Once, of course the mounts were torched out. So I removed all the linkages and hoses in preparation for disconnecting the engine/gearbox from the chassis.
Then it was time to pull the power pack. Since the bus is on wheels, and the pack isn't, I soon decided to block them off the ground a bit and just pull the bus forward away from them. Using a 6-ton hydraulic jack, I jacked the engine up until the bus itself rose about an inch. Then I blocked the power package up and checked that the bus was still higher off the springs than originally. This done, I carefully cut out the engine mounts front and rear, allowing the weight of the package to drop to the support of the blocks under it. I was VERY careful not to leave any fingers, toes, hands, or feet anywhere where the dropping engine could compromise their integrity!
Then I stood by with a wrecking bar to wedge the engine clear as necessary as an accomplice pulled the bus forward and clear of the powerpackage about 15 feet. This part went very smoothly.
Now I had the Flx, with engine room empty, beside the donor schoolie, ready for being cleaned, painted, and having a new power pack installed. It was really dirty in there, and it took me the better part of three weeks just clean off the multiple layers of DD drool, road grime, and general awfulness to the point at which it seemed worthwhile to prime and paint. Which I did next, thus filling in about a month since I'd begun the job of removing the power pack.
Which they were, anyway. I'd need a 20-foot tripod to get the engine clear of the fenders. As I was wishing I'd bought a schoolie with a flip front end, it ocurred to me that I could just remove the fenders and grille as a unit by rotating them forward as if it _were_ a flip front end - all I had to do was remove the radiator and all the bolts holding the assembly to the frame, and cut the fenders as far back as possible, from wheel well up and over the top to the inner fender. I did this with a cutoff wheel in my big Rockwell Circular saw, finishing off the tight places with the oxyacetlylene cutting torch. Working by myself, it took me a couple of days by the time I had the front sheet metal rotated off the front of the frame - over the bumper - and pulled far enough forward to be out of the way. Next, I unbolted the hood hinges from the firewall, letting the hood down onto the engine, and then flipped it forward in the same way. All this was done, remember, with only one man on the job. If I couldn't figure out how to do it all by myself, it had to wait until someone came along to give me a hand, and I didn't usually want to wait that long.
With the engine thus exposed, I did a preliminary cleaning with varsol and water from the hose - there was a garden hosebib nearby. I disconnected all linkages, removed the fan, alternator, and power steering pump, and the exhaust manifolds, after cutting the pipes off just past the manifolds with the cutoff saw.
Now, it was time for the tripod. I drilled holes close to the tops of the poles, and tied them together with 7/16" Reddi-Rod. Then I rigged the tripod over the engine, straddling the front wheels with two of the legs, and the third just ahead of the front bumper, so that the pull would be up and forward just a bit. The object was going to be to lift the engine away from the transmission and swing it up and forward to rest on the front crossmember and bumper once I got it loose. I attached the chain sling to the engine, the chain hoist to the top of the tripod, and took up the slack. Now to unbolt the engine.
Then I removed the access pan at the bottom of the bell housing, and removed the Flex Plate bolts which connect the engine flex plate to the torque converter. While I was under there, I also removed the bottom bell housing-transmission bolts. Then I jacked up and blocked the front of the transmission, since it soon would no longer be supported by the engine.
The rest of the transmission-engine bolts were accessible once I got the floorpan up inside the driving compartment, or simply by standing behind the front wheels. That flip front end is sure a lovely idea! All work I did on that bus during the years I ran it looked very difficult in retrospect, once I was able to get at things this way!. I loosened all of them, removing all but three - two on the sides and one at the top, until I was ready to pull the engine. I removed those bolts, cleaned them well, and replaced them oily, so they'd be easy to remove when I was ready to remove the engine.
Which I now was! After one last check to ensure that all linkages and wires were off, I put some tension on the chainblock, and removed the now finger-tight bellhousing bolts. A little finagling between chain tension and bolt work soon found the engine coming clear of the transmission, and it was simple work to raise it and swing it forward up onto the front cross member. I steadied it there with one hand while I let slack into the chain block support, finishing by putting a piece of 2X4 across the back for safety's sake. For this reason, I then "walked" each of the tripod legs forward so that the chainpblock was directly above the engine, and put some tension on the block again to hold the engine safely while I did the secondary cleaning.
I then did a really good job of cleaning up the engine. I had freshened it up less than 5000 miles previously, having the valves ground and heads resurfaced, and replacing the piston rings and bearing shells - both rods and mains. Inspection had revealed that the crankshaft journals were within spec, as were the cylinder bores - there was no ridge present in the cylinders. So all I had to do was clean it up a bit, and repair a couple of broken exhaust manifold studs. I drilled these out, blew out the residue, and cleaned up the threads in all the exhaust bolt holes with the correct tap while I had the engine up on this fine "workbench."
Then it was time to move the engine off the cross member. I decided to take it off and move it to the rear of the Flxi, for the time when I'd want to be mounting it to the transmission - a few weeks in the future. How could I move this big-block Ford engine around on uneven ground with the tools I had on hand? Since it had been a simple process to "walk" the tripod a foot or so forward when the chain was slack, and then pull the engine up and forward by re-tightening the chain, I decided I'd do the same thing first to get the engine off the front cross-member and onto the ground in front of the bus, and then, in a series of similar maneuvers, around the corner and down the length of the two busses from the front of the Ford to the rear of the Flx.
I started by re-positioning the three legs of the tripod about two feet forward of where they were at this point. Then I slowly tightened up the chainblock until the weight of the engine was mostly taken up from the cross-member, and managed to pull it forward and have it swing clear of the front bumper enough to lower it to the ground. This was the trickiest move of the whole process, since it was being dropped about 3 feet as well as being moved forward, but it went without a hitch. I soon had the engine on the ground.
The rest is self-explanatory. I moved the tripod in increments of about 2 feet in between lifts, so that tensioning the chain pulled the engine up and in the direction I wanted it to go, then got it swinging and pulled it in the proper direction as I took the tension off with the other hand - I only had to lift it less than a foot from the ground for each of these moves. In an hour or so, I had it sitting back of the Flx, far enough back so it wouldn't be in the way of the transmission work about to begin. Now for the transmission. At AT534 is a fairly heavy lump, and it would have to be lifted clear of the crossmember to which it was mounted at its front, moved back, and dropped to the ground below. A little work with a tape measure also revealed that I'd have to dig a ditch for it to move under the frame to come out the side, and that I'd have to cut a notch out of the sideskirt sheetmetal of the busbody from ditch to frame height to allow it out. While under there, I removed the driveshaft brake cable and driveshaft, as well as disconnecting the shift linkage cable.
I decided to use a pair of 2X6 planks to form a "railway" for the transmission, with 3/4" pipe rollers between them and a piece of plywood under the box. So I first dug the ditch, set the planks in it, and placed the rollers and plywood under the transmission's destiny with gravity. I dug the ditch as a ramp so as to raise the thing to ground level as it cleared the top of the notch in the skirt.
Now, how to move that transmission around? There was sufficient access through the removable floor panel to get at everything. I cut a pair of 2X4 support straps and blocked them off the floor above the transmission. There are lifting eyes on the top of the trans casing, and I bored holes in the straps to accomodate 4 pieces of 7/16" Reddi-Rod. I passed the Reddi-Rod through the lifting eyes at the four corners of the tranny, and screwed washers and nuts at the bottom ends to support it. Passing the straps over the reddi-rod at the top, with more nuts and washers, made it possible to take the weight off the tranny mounts as they were unbolted and pulled out.
Once the mounts were out, it was possible to swing the transmission on its supporting rods far enough back to clear the cross-member, and then it was just a matter of unscrewing the top nuts to allow it to drop down and rest on its plywood platform, supported by the rollers on the planks. Then it was simple enough to pull it along its little railway and out into the light of day. Simple as this sounds, it should be admitted that it took me the better part of a week to get the job done.
From there, I continued the railway gag down the length of the Flx until the gearbox was behind the bus, between it and the engine. Now for the mounts!
I was going to have to mount the Allison in the bus first, using only the "front" mounts in a new cross-member, and then move the engine into the space, raise it to the tranny, and bolt them together. Then I'd be able to block up the front of the engine (now the rear, of course!) and build mounts to hold it in place at that end.
First, the tranny mounts. I would begin by torching the old cross-member out of the schoolie. A little tape-measure work, however, revealed that I'd need the full length of the cross-member, so I'd have to remove the rivets that held it into the frame rails. I cleaned up the torch tip carefully for each cut, but still wasn't able to blow off the first rivet head without melting any rivet to frame or cross-member. The system that finally evolved involved heating each rivet head up cherry red, then knocking it off with my air chisel. It took a few re-heats for each rivet, but they finally let go.
But I was still not able to punch the rivets out! They were swaged tightly into the holes! I finally managed to get them out with heat and a punch in the air chisel - handy tools, those! Without air, the chisel, and the cutting torch, I'd STILL be trying to get things loose! These are minimum tooling for the job! As it was, it took me a couple of days to get the cross-member out.
I found I needed the full length of the crossmember, because the distance inside the Flx's engine room was really wide. It had been barely enough for the monster DD, but the Allison - and the 391 - would fit with plenty of room to spare. What I wish I'd known at the time was that Flx, during the times of the earlier engines, such as the Buick Straight 8, had mounted their power pack on an easily removable cradle, which was then bolted into the space between the frame rails! Doing it this way would have helped me enormously - especially since I had to build the mounts a few hundred yards away in the shop, where the arc welder was. The cut-and-fit process was therefore much more complicated - and, unfortunately, less accurate.
However, not knowing at the time about the cradle option, I started by preparing a pair of "cheek plates" of 1/4" steel - designed to bolt to the forward frame rails in the bus, to which would be fillet-welded the old Allison-mount cross member, once it was cut to the exact length - and at the exact angles - necessary for a perfect fit.
First I cut the cheek plates, then clamped them to the frame rails, and drilled through the existing holes in the rails. I added some more holes, all for 7/16" No. 8 Bolts. Then I bolted them in temporarily with 3 bolts to a side, and began the cut-and-fit process of grinding the ends of the cross-member. Once I got the size right, since I couldn't just clamp and weld - the welder was a few hundred yards away, I settled for many trips back and forth, tacking, trying, grinding, bolting, etc. If I had known then what I know now, I could simply have built a cradle using the simple basic measurments, fitted it into the Flx, removed it, and done my tranny and engine mounts in the shop!
However, I'll continue with the description of how I did it in this case - and we mustn't forget that sliding in a cradle full of engine and tranny on the ground I had, with the tools I had, would have been a nasty process at any rate.
Eventually, I got the cross-member welded to the cheek plates, and the assembly bolted into place in the bus. Then, using the plank railway, I rolled the tranny into the engine room up to the cross member, and, using a sawhorse in the baggage room, and the chain block for lifting, got it lifted up and over the cross member and into place just above the cross member. I slipped in the tranny mounts, and dropped it into place and bolted it up, leaving block supports under the front for the time being.
 230 HP 391 engine, and a mooring block for an aircraft carrier |
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Showing the Allison and Torque Converter, all ready for their 391 to be bolted on. This after a couple of months of carry-on! |
Then it was time for the engine. I lifted it up with the tripod one last time, and slipped planks, rollers, and plywood under the oil pan as for the transmission. It rolled easily into place just behind the tranny, and of course about 18 inches too low. Now to figure out a way to raise it and push it into place onto the transmission.
Looking around for ideas, I found some old bumper jacks - the kind with a hook on the slider for the bumper adapter. I put one at each corner of the engine, hooking the hook into the open exhaust port. Then I tried lifting the engine just enough to get the rollers out, substituting blocks, so that the engine wouldn't be able to drop more than an inch or so if the jacks slipped out. Then I continued to raise it, following each "ratch-up" or two with blocks for safety's sake - never allowing more than an inch or so of space between oilpan and blocks. I had to fabricate a specially-bent jack handle to allow using the jacks in the space available, but it worked fine.
Eventually, it was close enough to present to the transmission. This was the first time in the whole process I needed some help. I got my wife down to help by stabilizing the engine, pushing it forward from time to time, as I managed to work four long bolts - 4 inchers - into place as guides for the final fitting. The engine supported as it was almost at full bumper jack-length swung around quite easily - remember it was only an inch or so off the safety blocks!
About 10 minutes of careful precise movements - of the four jacks and the bolts - a little levering, and we got the engine bolted into place on the transmission. I blocked it at the crankshaft pulley more permanently, in such a way as to leave access for fitting the front cross member/engine mount from the Ford, and the job was ready for this final mounting maneuver.
It was also the end of the first summer's work on the bus! It was soon too cold to work comfortably, so I covered everything up to await the next spring, when I'd deal with hooking things up so that I could move my happy purchase of what was now 5 months previously. This field maintenance stuff takes TIME!