A redneck vacation!
Warning, this is long and lots of pictures!
CS posted pics of his new shed and talked about pulling motors so I thought I would share my motor pulling experience from back in 2008.
A few years ago I went to my favorite junkyard to look for a motor to rebuild for my GTO. I love this place! I’ve known the owners for many years and I am allowed to just show up with a tool box and pull my own. Now, the story behind the junkyard is as great as the place and the owners..see, back in the 40’’s-60’s this was a clean well laid out place with wide open roads and stonewalls to separate different manufacturers,etc. Sometime later, the father passed away and the boys took the place over. The side of the road that the garage is no looks and works like a regular junkyard..sort of. But the old yard has grown over and is literally the greatest treasure hunting grounds a gearhead could ever find. I like to go in the spring before the leaves show up and see what I can find.
So, I hunted one Saturday for the engine I wanted to get. I had my engine code book and a flashlight as well as some steel wool and carb cleaner. There are lots of Pontiacs so it was quite a bit of fun popping hoods and looking. I had found plenty of 400’s that would be fine but none had the numbers that I wanted. About 2 in the afternoon, I found a 68 Grand Prix about 200 feet from the nearest thing you could call a trail. I looked under the hood and there was the motor I was after!
To put this into perspective, A big block Pontiac with all the accessories weighs about 650 lbs. I had to get it through the woods and over other cars nearly 200 feet to get to my pickup without any equipment…piece of cake! I went to work and dug through the metal dumpster and found a few old guy wires that were removed and thrown away. I also grabbed a hubeye and a couple of eye bolts from the trash and borrowed a bit and brace off the truck. Grabbed my climbing gear and headed home for the tools I would normally use to pull and engine.
When I got to the yard, I found a pine about 30 feet behind the car and climbed it, drilled a hole and installed the bolt and hung the guy wire using a preform. I unrolled the guywire over the cars and to a tree on the other side of the road where I climbed another tree and did the same thing again. That second tree wasn’t as strong, so I also ran a guy wire to the base of another tree to hold the tension..I didn’t do that to the larger tree. I also went much higher in the tree close to the car so that it would be a downhill ride to the road.
I had that motor out in less that 2 hours! I’m proud of that because that car had been sitting in that same spot sense 1977 and there was quite a bit of rust and rot on the bolts. The antifreeze was full and clean and the oil looked good as well, so I didn’t care about the condition of the rest of the car. I had to pull the car out of the dirt to get under it, then find some rims to set the car on and go to work.
I used a hotline hoist to pull the motor. I hung it from a snatchblock off the guywire and tied a rope to the snatchblock and to a tree to keep the hoist in position until I had the motor clear of everything…pretty good thinking for a dumb lineman, huh? When I had the motor over the fenders, I tied a guide rope to it so that if it wouldn’t move from gravity, I could pull it along. I lifted the motor about 8 feet in the air before I felt confident that I could fly it out without getting into any of the other cars I had to pass over. I released the snatchblock and just like I had planned, the motor took off towards the road….for a minute. The first car I had to fly over was a ragtop barracuda and I was worried about something slipping and destroying that car. The motor passed just fine over that but I could see that the guywire had more slack in it than I planned and there was a row of Impala’s that I needed to get past before I was out to the road. It didn’t make it! The motor crashed through the roof of a mid 70’s impala and came to rest where the windshield was just a minute before! Rats! I had to go talk to the owner.
Luckily, the owner has a good sense of humor and that Impala wasn’t worth the dirt it was covering up! We looked things over and decided it was still a good plan, we just needed to tighten up the guywire and it should lift the motor and get it moving again. He brought his Michigan loader down the road and we hooked him to the guy wire. The plan now was for him to back up just a little and pull the wire tight again. What we didn’t know is that the big pine I had hooked to had started to uproot and that was where the slack had come from….remember the ragtop Cuda I was worried about?
The motor went right up in the air when he put tension on it. I pulled the a tag line and moved it about 40 more feet and everything came to the ground! I flattened another hood! This time a 70’s javelin. We were both very confused..everything seemed right. The good news was the motor was close enough to the road that we could load it into the truck, the bad news was we didn’t know why it didn’t get there by itself.
I followed the guy wire back to the pine and found that the guy had pulled through the preform! I’ve only seen that happen once before! I also discovered the pine hanging over the Cuda.. We left the bolt in the tree for historic record and I left with my motor and the owner still has the pictures on the wall of his garage! The pine is still hanging over the Cuda and this happened in June of 08.
These are some pics of the yard.
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The hood looks funny on this Javelin, huh? See the scars on the trees? That’s from the loader picking the motor off the poor little AMC.
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The failure in my planning! Lol.
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Success!!
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Originally Posted by Rick
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