Now that my Vintage Riley is being enjoyed and used for its intended purpose by its new owners (Vintage Sports Car Racing), my attention can shift back to the MK4. The primary focus continuing to be the release of the seized engine. Although the blog has been quiet recently, some effort has been spent on moving this forwards, primarily - trying to work out how to remove the gearbox through the interior of the car like the manual advises. I had found a couple of bulkhead panels that seemingly were not removable but were in reality possible but fiddly to remove, the fixings were merely hidden requiring a level of experience that I simply do not have. Moving on...
The next challenge was working out what else needed to be removed in order to move the gearbox backwards. I had unbolted it from the rubber mount and disconnected wiring, speedo drive, prop shaft, gear lever etc and using the engine crane the gearbox and engine would lift off the chassis as-a-unit so conceptually all that was now needed was to remove all the connecting bolts between the engine and gearbox - which I did. With all the bolts removed (checked and double checked), sadly the gearbox refused to part from the engine so the last few weeks were consumed worrying that perhaps the main gearbox shaft had rusted into the clutch plate and that was potentially bad news. I did in fact get to the point of seriously considering removing the gearbox and engine at the same time but it was then that I notice that the top area of the gearbox had (very) slightly separated from the engine block so if I was careful with some wedges perhaps I could coax the two components apart... and this turned out to be the case.. they did indeed slowly ease apart.
With new found enthusiasm - I ensured the gearbox and engine were parallel with each other and continued to tickle them apart with a mix of large screwdrivers. This was going well.. until it stopped moving, oh poop I thought, what's up now? Looking inside the car, I could see the back of the gearbox was hitting a chassis crossmember so 'somehow' the gearbox needed lifting up in order to clear that. The gearbox looked pretty heavy but given the weight of the engine had mostly been countered by the Engine Crane, I found it was possible to crouch inside the car (with my feet on the garage floor because I had removed the floor boards) - I could lift the back of the gearbox enough to then wriggle it backwards until finally (Ta-dah) it separated and sat on the crossmember. With the gearbox clear, it was now simple enough to lift the engine up and out of the engine bay (fanfare number 2).
The clutch itself appears to be in reasonable condition, but obviously it has not been used in many many years so I will replace it as a matter of course, the flywheel is lightly scored but that will be refaced too.
Next steps are to get the engine onto the 'engine stand' so it can be rotated and worked on... i.e. I can remove the crankshaft etc in order to give the pistons a little persuasion. Onwards and upwards...
