Quote:
Originally Posted by sarguy01
One of the chains came loose, as he was backing the forklift up and the tail shaft of the transmission slammed down on the radiator support. The back end of the trans rolled off and hit me in the chest, throwing me into a parts rack behind me. I had two cuts on my back and a bruise on my chest.
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eek!
Most difficult repair for me was a week underneath while on stands a toyota celica 1989 taking out the old power steering rack, easy enough, but getting the new one in, a major pain with the engine and gearbox still in there.
I was not only scared of the car coming down ontop of me as the only thing holding it up was two stands, twas my first time underneath a car for longer than an hour, but besides that the rack had to come in at 360 angles and then clear quite a few poles and objects on its way to the firewall.
Aside from that, lifting the bonnet on a 1980s Ford Falcon XF Sedan X-Pack was enough for me, I bought a Toyota based upon the fact that in this paticular Ford each bolt on the engine or body was a slight variation from the other one, with a mix of imperial and metric bolts, some of them 25-30 years old and have seen a various number of badly made cheap tools on them.
And when I checked the timing gear, 1st piston exhaust and intake rocker/pushrods were pushed up higher than normal with a stack of 3 washers. Removing the washers resulted in an engine which would detonate and ping like crazy and once engine ignition had been cut the engine continued to run for at least 15 seconds after turning it off. The emissions control system was a mixture of vacuum operated and electronic solenoid with no clear indication of any match to anything in the service manual for any year that the car had come out, infact it was closest to a hybrid between XD and XE vacuum emissions control systems.
I never did figure out the proper arrangement of all of the tubes and solenoids, ended up sending it to the wreckers because the detonating and pinging was just getting too crazy and the rust had set in.
Car drove like beautiful though, I could put the front wheels right on the edge of a white line from feel alone, it had a beautiful front end suspension and steering system, all manual, no power steering to detatch from the feel of the road, and this is a real big car, no small thing.
In retrospect I wish I had kept it and rebuilt the engine, it would have made a great post-nuclear vehicle as the thing was EMP proof, should have done more repairs on the body, but it was just a sedan and I needed a wagon, and its not going to win any awards at the track on performance and the people around here thought it was an ugly car.
I'll have to wait until my father gives up driving then maybe I will get his XF Wagon to rebuild.