Today was a big day on the Diesel S10 project!
I FINALLY had a Sunday to myself! (Way too busy at work lately, and other projects..)
So, last night I called up my buddy Rich, and e-mailed a few other folks to see if anyone else could come out for the engine pull.
This morning Rich, and Tim (who you may remember welded the Electro-Metro from INSIDE the engine compartment..) came over so we could pull the 4-cylinder diesel engine from the Mercedes 240D.
These guys are animals of car destruction. The showed up at 9am and we had the engine out before noon. I had done hardly any prep work on the car before they got there!
Rich brought his fine selection of tools, including the engine hoist and car ramps.
Here, Tim stands next to the freshly pulled 2.4L diesel engine (with attached automatic transmission)
Since we made quick work of the first engine, we then took a lunch break. Tim let me drive his Prius to drive into town for lunch. It was a little weird. It's a nice car, but I typically don't have an engine, just an electric motor, when I make that trip! (Please see the Electro-Metro build thread...)
Back from lunch, we went to work on removing the 2.2L 4-cylinder gas engine from the S10. It was a little more work in that we couldn't just cut cables at random, and I wanted to keep useful things like steering, coolant and washer resevoirs, etc.
We ended up having to remove the driveshaft, pull the engine part way out, remove the engine mounts, then pull the engine the rest of the way out.
We did remove the transmission from the diesel engine, but it was getting dark by the time the gas engine was out, so that one still has the tranny on it.
One good thing I did find out about the diesel transmission is that it already has an "adapter plate" of sorts between the engine and transmission. Apparently, this is something they did to make their various engines and transmissions a little more interchangable. For me, it means I have a head-start on a way to connect the Mercedes diesel engine with the Chevy manual transmission.
What's next?
It's time to remove the manual tranny from the S10 gas engine, and then start figuring out and adapter plate design.
After pulling both engines, the diesel DOES look pretty monsterous compared to the gas engine. I measured, and it should fit fine, but it will be a bit of work making everything line up!
Also, the diesel has a really low oil pan on the far FRONT of the engine, and the steering went BEHIND that. On the truck, the oil pan is in the BACK of the engine and the steering goes in FRONT of it. Figuring how all that is going to work will be fun!
Again, the goal of this project is to have a utility vehicle capable of going long distances with one or two people, getting very good fuel economy, while sometimes carrying a heavy/bulky load or towing, and be able to run on biofuels.
A small-engine bio-diesel pickup truck meets that bill nicely!
(Chevy 2.2L gasoline engine, with Tim for scale.)