Removing engines from van chassis have been a source of consternation the world over for half a century if not longer. As I explained in the Snekvan extraction post, special attachments are made by the OEM or conjured by the amateur to facilitate this process, often requiring removing the everything beforehand and a series of Old Hong Kong Airport maneuvers with a dangling engine block.

This is what I think makes this engine pull so funny – I’m sure somebody has done it this way before, but I’m going to document it all for posterity to reflect on how dumb it all was. In the last episode, I got to stripping everything off the engine and detaching the engine and transmission mounts.

I created a set of lifting points at the very back of the intake manifold using two 3/8″ eye bolts. The idea is to grab the engine and transmission at this line using a chain. The barycenter of the assembly is still in front of this line, so it will tend to tilt forward as I lift.

The plan was to use a 3rd point of contact at the front of the engine to control the rotation and let me twist it out of the frame and out the hole. For this operation, I was going to use a ratchet strap as said third point of contact.

Let’s do the pull! Here’s the chain looped into the eye bolts and seated in the loving embrace of Econospoon.

A few pumps of the crane cylinder and we are officially off the ground.

I applied the “Attitude Control Ratchet Strap” to the water pump shaft. Sorry, sensitive rotating component I don’t care about any more. You are now a load-carrying member.

After lifting the engine clear of the mounting studs, I pulled it forward out of the cross-member until the oil pan was against the front U-shaped body stamping. Then I had to lift upwards to clear the oil pan over this stamping.

The transmission tail cone will hit the cabin at the back of the doghouse cover area at this point. If I didn’t have the Gear Vendors extension housing, it would have cleared (barely), I think.

This is where the Attitude Control Ratchet Strap comes in handy. By tightening it, I raise the front of the engine and subsequently drop the transmission end enough to keep gently pulling out and upwards.

The last upward raise and pull will clear the engine mounts over the body.

With that pull, we are officially in the clear.

And here it is, roughly 1000 or so pounds on the very end of the crane. Notice my car battery ballast holding the ass down to prevent another oopsie.

The engine decided to puke some leftover coolant from the block drain as it was being tilted, so I washed that off the floor… that’s why it’s in a puddle with the garden hose still blasting away.

The next step is to set the assembly down on a 1,000 pound Harbor Freight moving cart and snap it in half immediately because Harbor Freight, in its wisdom, eliminated the spanning metal tube connecting the long sides of this moving cart.

The only 1,000 pounds it’s ever carrying is a statically placed slab of steel, uniformly distributing the load over the ribbed plastic molding. Don’t even look at it funny.

(Note: As of the Present Day, the version they sell of this moving cart now has a full rectangle of steel tubing)

I was up to my ventricles in van debris at this point, with the IDIot in the foreground and the fresh smoker’s lung in the background. This was enough of an undertaking that I decided to take a break and get rid of some of this stuff first.

I posted the whole package for sale. The engine and transmission, all of the hosiery and fittings, all of the accessory drives. I wanted someone to just make it disappear instead of me dealing with a conga line of tire kickers and ghosters, and would gladly lose money doing so.

Seriously, selling on Facebook Marketplace is a great look at how bad Americans have become at being noncommittal and waffling. It’s like some people get off to the mere thought of almost buying something but then closing the window before they consummate the act. The fantasy of spending money on a whimsy. Whatever the case, I’m sure it isn’t a good health measure of our society.

But I lucked out! Someone actually did want the ENTIRE PACKAGE. A couple of guys from the south side of town resto-modding an 1970s F-100 were quite excited at the prospect of putting the big-block 460 into it, along with everything else it worked with. They didn’t even bicker at my price – which, as I mentioned, is basically buying a FITech head unit and a Gear Vendors overdrive. Probably could have gotten more, I suppose, but I have other things I want to do besides sell car parts.

Honestly, those guys basically funded the rest of Operation IDIocracy. And I hope to see that F-100 at a show some day soon!

There’s no turning back now. The already white elephant was now missing legs too…

I have to do this sooner or later, right?

After the BattleBots 2022 season was all over in October, I took a bit of a slump away from #OperationIDIocracy and also just working on stuff in general for a little while. The warm fall days were soon going to be replaced by cold, moist, and dark winter, my least favorite season by a strong margin. I spent a few weeks just going to meetup and shows, as well as tidying up this here website (the obvious flurry of activity in October – November 2022 is a telltale sign I ran out of other things to do).

In retrospect with all that went down… maybe I should have accelerated the schedule before the winter ugggghhhh kicked in, but at the time, I wanted to avoid the dreaded project car fate of being burnt out by your own project car.

I decided that Thanksgiving weekend of 2022 would be Vantruck’s last hurrah before it’s laid up for its RCOH and mid-lifecycle update. With the engine built and mated to the transmission already and as many parts in house as I knew to order, I had to pull the band-aid off.

Here we go! Bright and early on Black Friday, I started pulling everything out of the bed. The toolbox was unloaded onto some carts, and I also removed the big bathtub (and subsequently sold it – I didn’t like how much water it collected and would rather invest in a spray-in liner). The fuel filler hoses were unscrewed from the fender wells.

After the Glorious Van Butt (oh crap, i never posted about that) comes off and the bed bolts are removed, I rigged up the extra long #OSHACrane arm again for the purpose it was built… all the way back in 2017!

To pull the engine from Snekvan, I turned it into something I called Econospoon, but it worked the same still: Two long ratchet straps were slung over it in an X shape. The arm was made long enough to reach the center of the 8 foot bed from the back.

Then I just lift it upwards with the crane and drive off! I landed it on the previously-built bed dolly with some collected help, and we pushed the bed away.

Vantruck was taken to its somewhat-temporary-ideally-not-final resting place, where it remained until The Big Funny happened. Considering I left it taken it apart for all of December and January like this, with parts scattered everywhere… Yeah, I deserved that.

Really, I was now just going scorched-earth and removing everything in sight. The first thing to come off is the FITech fuel injection gear, which I planned on reselling. This canister is the good ol’ “Fuel Command Center”, which yours truly popped apart and documented a hack for when it was causing problems. It’s been running ever since then, with no problems at all.

I had no system or science to this dissection process. I just removed everything that the tool I was holding in my hand could loosen or unscrew, then grabbed a different tool and started that process again. Needle nose pliers? Sure, those work for hose spring clamps, screws and nuts under 1/4″-20 in size, and vacuum line retainers too!

The thing with these old “analog emissions” engines, as I called it, was the miles of hoses and vacuum lines they all came with because of tightening emissions regulations after the 1970s predating computer-controlled closed loop fuel injection by a hot decade or so. The commonly termed “Malaise Era” was when a lot of these big American engines became encumbered with vacuum-powered thermostats and surge valves and ported one-way turboenculabulators and the like. One of my remarks when I heard the 460 only made ~220 HP in this time was something to the effect of “Never have I heard of so little being done with so much”

Vantruck’s EFI retrofit made almost all of these slowly deteriorating hoses and valves unnecessary…. not that I think any of it was working to begin with. Besides what I removed during the FITech install in 2017, it was all left in place at the time.

One thing I could not wait to get to was a chance to basically start over from scratch on the Ford Spaghetti OEM wiring. Not only that, but Vantruck being an aftermarket-finished vehicle means the Ford Spaghetti got some special meatballs connected to it too, all over the place. The wiring on this thing has always been a disgusting mess, not that the others were better or anything.

In fact, working on the wiring for the many IDI ven has traumatized so much that I vowed to create a near-OEM grade integration for the diesel electrical system. That is an entire side quest to write about, something I began sketching out around this time as the L.E.W.D (Legacy Electrical Wiring Distribution) harness.

I’ve knocked the front off now (ouch, those rust holes on the front right fender sill plate) and am removing the transmission and oil cooler hoses.

I planned on reusing the external transmission cooler, but the 7.3 IDI will have its own oil cooler already, so this part won’t make it back on in the interest of minimizing unnecessary hosiery.

The 460 radiator is big, but not as big as the IDI radiator! The brackets were pretty rust-welded to the sheet metal, and I broke the bond by raising it with a jack. I’m planning to clean up and re-coat or rustproof Bracketry as I need them on the reassembly path later.

The big 460 sits rather low in the chassis. For some reason it was never apparent to me, but I guess I just never looked at it in the disassembled state. I started removing the accessory drives and deeper-buried fluid lines at this point.

I found a funny failure mode when I removed the ignition control module – the entire potting/sealing compound had detached from the module. In one piece. It was literally just sitting there under it. Protecting nothing in particular from the elements. The module underneath clearly showed some corrosion of the casing, and who knows what else.

I’m not sure if this was part of the cause of Vantruck’s slightly funny running and bad attitude when it was raining or wet, but I’m also not saying it wasn’t aliens.

Pretty much everything’s gone from the engine side of things, so I dove under to release the Gear Vendors unit, which I’ll also sell. With the planned 4-speed transmission install, I didn’t see a point in running a “double overdrive” which I’ve heard some people do.

I’ve never actually removed the exhaust pipe from Vantruck before, and didn’t see a way to remove it from the top side, with how the manifold extended under the cabin sheet metal. Well, with enough extensions and swivels, anything is possible from the underside, I suppose!? This is the passenger side, where everything comes really close to the frame rail. The driver side was pleasant in comparison.

One of the very last operations was to release the main engine mount bolts located on the engine cross-member.

With the last hoses removed and transmission linkage released as well, only gravity held the 460 and C6 transmission in.

I had built up around me an enormous pile of Van Paraphernalia. No other way to explain it! I was hoping to sell all of this soon to a single party if I could help it, alongside the engine and transmission. After all, these are all parts from a known running truck.

On the next episode, I’ll demonstrate a rigid pull of the 460 and C6 together, without separating them, from the van chassis….