GC8 Engine Tear Down – Part 1

After yeeting the motor in the GC8 at the track, it’s been gathering a bit of dust in the shed as I ordered a couple of preemptive parts (head gaskets and ARP bolts), but this weekend we finally decided to get into pulling the motor out of the car and begin tearing it down.

The Legnum is still hogging the hoist so this will be an on the floor job 🙁

I’m not a big fan of jack stands, so I always throw these trusty rims under the wheels…

Dropping the oil showed some interesting colours

Plenty of metal.

Radiator is out and stacked aside

Now to move onto removing the alternator and unbolting the air con compressor.

I will use the AC mounting points as a lifting point.

The AC just moves to the battery bay and gets tied up out of the road.

Bellhousing and engine mount bolts are then removed and we are ready to start lifting.

Nearly out!

And done!

And now it’s on the engine stand, ready for tear down.

The intake manifold was removed.

And then I realized I had made a rookie error, I removed the flywheel before I had undone the crank pulley bolt… So I had to resort to an old trick I learnt years ago. You pull a spark plug out, and you feed a bunch of rope into the cylinder bore. Then you wind the crank to the point where the rope is jammed between the piston and the head. The soft rope prevents damaging any parts but jams up the assembly solid enough to be able to undo the crank bolt.