Wow! What an absolutely gonzo weekend of HMMWV work! Friday night was spent going over the M998 taking inventory of everything and trying to create a plan of attack. I had already arranged to have a running LL4 6.2L engine pulled from a K20 Chevy at a wrecking yard in OH and was planning on leaving Charleston around 6:30 am Saturday with a buddy to go fetch it. We left town close to on schedule and made it to Reynoldburg in about 3 hours. The guy from the yard brought the engine up front with a forklift and sat it in the bed of the F350. It may have been a runner, but it was a filthy, disgusting, greasy wretch of an engine. The asshats managed to break the fuel pump, destroy the air cleaner, break the water cross-over, poke a hole in the driver's valve cover, crush the oil pan, bend a couple of injector lines and bend the front pulley when extracting the engine. It looks like they pulled it with an excavator and then rolled it back to the shop by hitting it with the bucket. What a bunch of idiots! Anywho, the price was really good and I didn't need any of the broken stuff so I strapped it down and dropped the hammer on the Powerstroke all the way back to WV.
Once we got to Charleston, we stopped at an auto parts place to pick up a few things including a can of Gunk gel to clean 15 lbs of crap off of the engine. $10 later the engine and the Ford were a lot cleaner. It turns out that the 6.2L in the old K20 was a GM crate motor. I guess they grenaded the original engine at some point and then dropped in a replacement. The engine looked pretty good after we cleaned it. Turns out most of the oil came from the puking hole in the valve cover and out of the open dipstick tube. I was feeling a little better about my purchase as we made our way home.
Once we were back in the driveway, my buddy, Jess, and I stripped all of the non-humvee engine parts off of the "new" engine and readied it for transplant. No sooner than we finished that, it came a big hail storm with pea to golf ball-sized hail, driving rain and 50 mph straight-line winds. It was nuts! We worked through most of the storm until the power got knocked out. I put an LED headlight on my head and cleaned up around the garage before collapsing in a filthy, stinking heap around 10 pm. The power didn't come back on until early the next morning, which wasn't bad considering the storm.
Sunday morning came and the prego wife wasn't up to going to church so I hit the garage hard about 8 am. I continued prepping the locked-up humvee engine and getting it ready for extraction until my buddy got there around noon. We hooked the cherry picker up, put a jack under the tranny, unbolted the engine mounts from the block and then a problem hit, the dang engine was locked up so I couldn't spin it over to get all of the flex-plate/converter bolts out. Crap... So, we unbolted the tranny and pulled the engine with the converter attached. It made a little mess with ATF on the floor but not too bad. Once it was out I was able to get the last three bolts out and set the converter on the floor for later. The rest of the day was spent stripping parts off of the locked up engine and transferring them to the donor engine. We finally quit around midnight with the good engine on the stand and looking pretty decent.
Labor Day morning started around 8 am again. I was alone since Jess had to work. I spent most of the day swapping out the moron-damaged valve cover, the moron-broken fuel pump, the fuel inlet and outlet lines, and the exhaust headers. I also prepped the heads for the intake manifold that should arrive in the UPS truck this week as well as straightened the injector lines and tidied everything up. The last chore before putting the engine in was to install a new trans pump seal and put the converter back in. My Dad and my father-in-law were at the house that evening so after we finished our rain-soaked cookout, I invited them out to the garage to help me guide the good engine into position. We managed to fight the engine into place and lined it up with the tranny using 2 jacks, a 2x6, and some brute force. Only thing left to do then was bolt up the tranny and bolt the engine mounts back to the block. It was kind of a PITA to get the mounts to line up with the block holes, but I got it done.
Yesterday, I spent a good deal of time shopping for all of the parts I need to get the swap finished. I had to order an oil filter adapter, adapter bolt, filter reducer, oil/fuel/air/tranny filters, oil pan, intake horn, 24v fuel shutoff, dipstick, engine fan, radiator brackets, thermostat, alternator brackets, power steering pump brackets, a hood wiring harness, glow plugs, belts, hoses, temp sending unit, cold advance temp switch, and a fuel tank drain plug. The UPS man is gonna love me! Only thing I have left to track down is a fan clutch and a 60A generator. Let me know if you have any leads on them! I have a 100A 24v/12v alternator by Leece Neville in the garage that I am hoping will fit. We'll see once the alt brackets get here.
Well, I think that's it for now. I am hoping to get it running this weekend. I think the only thing left to buy is a couple of Optima red tops. I have a bunch of pics that I will post later. Stay tuned!!
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