Well, it’s a good luck bad luck story. The install went smoothly, almost too smooth. I loosened all main cap bolts a turn or a bit more, depressed the clutch pedal and scotched it with a convenient piece of 2x4, removed the asbestos rope seal from the 0w16 oil it’d been soaking in for 3 days, molded it into shape in the rear main bearing cap, used two big screw drivers one for each side of the flywheel to leverage it down, coated the seal with Vaseline, hooked up the Sneaky Pete, and then,,,,,,,,pulled the rope seal into place in about 20 seconds! What, What, I’ve spent all day trying to get one in place.
I used a 2” socket to to mold the seal into the main bearing cap. One unexpected thing was that a new single edge razor blade doesn’t like cutting asbestos. I finally resorted to a new sharp 8" set of dikes.
Almost done. But then Karma bit. It was while torquing the cap bolts (two were already at 105 lbs) when taking the 3rd from 80 to 105 ft lbs there was a moment when it didn’t feel right and then SNAP! Yep, broke bolt. Karma was back.
At that point I gave it a good quick look, slid out from under the truck and headed to the house. Later that evening we were getting ready to head to town for supper and I couldn’t stand it. With the wife still getting ready I went back to the shop, pulled the bearing cap and decided to give the broken piece a go. With a small diameter sharp punch and small brass hammer it took all of 5 minutes to back the stub out. Take That Karma !
