Heads off

Finally on a holiday! Even though most of the spare time was booked before I started the poject, managed to give the baby a little attention.

Gears from the left side removed

Timing belt rollers, tensioners and protection plates removed

Gears on the left side were very co-operative coming out and didn't have any issues there. The starter motor tried to put some drama to the table however since the first bolt I tried to open snapped without any losening. Great. Luckily it was the only one so I got the starter motor off. I measured the depth of the threads on the starter motor and it seems that the depth plus the thickness of the engine pretty much equals the length of the bolt. So the snapped bolt is stuck to the bottom of the starter motor's hole. Sounds a bit scary since if the bolt is too long, it may not be possible to tighten the bolt enough. So I need to check if shorter ones are necessary.

Poor man's engine stand (packing foam) works well enough

Cylinder head

The piston was not taken off with the cylinder

Headnut tool

The head nuts were pretty damn tight. Looked like the baby wanted to keep her heads, but me and Mr. WD-40 disagreed. Still too tight to turn with open-ended wrench as it might break the nut or maybe I'm just a bit overly cautious, but the box-end side was too thick. Luckily my father had made a special tool for removing the heads for valve adjustments so that one came in handy. There's an OEM tool as well, but my father wasn't the kind of man who would buy one if you can make one by yourself even if it was a cheap one :)

The horizontal head came out easily and the cylinder stayed on it's place but the other head was so tight that the cylinder came out with the head and also managed to slip the piston out from the cylinder. No biggie, was asking for advice from the forums whether to take the pistons out or not and thought I'm gonna leave them inside. Well, now I just need to get piston ring compressors which are affordable.

Finally managed to separate the vertical head from the cylinder, but it was pretty damn tight. I cut the liquid gasket with a piece of a sharpened soft plastic but didn't help. There are small guide rings that apparently are there to prevent any vertical play between the cylinder and the head and one of them was stuck in both sides but finally the head side gave up and came out. Seemed to be a bit corroded so maybe the sealing wasn't as good as it could be last time the heads were off. I'm sure I at least try to be much more careful.

Next I'll continue with removing the right side cover. Hopefully today.