Pulling a Baja motor

I spent the morning powder coating some gas pump parts for my Dad and when I got home my thermometer said 103 degrees. I figured that was plenty cool to pull the motor out of the baja. I pushed it into the garage and kroiled all the rusted bolts. The motors come out of a baja bug easier than they do a regular bug. The reason is you don't have to jack up the car to get the motor out. After you pull the bumper off you can just pull the engine straight out the back. The only real snag I ran into was all the rust. It seemed like every bolt I tried to get off was rusted on tight. Here are the pictures that show the progress. I had to put some newspaper down to cover up the oil on the floor from my other bug. I thought I had all the leaks fixed but not quite. Darn it, the engine may come back out this winter to fix the leak. Here is what I started with.

 The bumper was rusted on so I had to pull the wheels off to get to some of the bolts. As you can see, it finally did come off.

 This is the reason the bug was parked in the first place. I think it was run low on oil and ended up throwing a rod. These holes are on the top of the block forward side.

 A more close up view shows how bad it is. This block is going to the scrap yard for sure.

So to pull the engine you unhook the wires to the alternator, oil sensor, reverse lights, then disconnect the fuel line underneath, disconnect the heater cables and ducts, pull your throttle cable out of the doghouse so it doesn't hang up and then put a jack underneath the engine. Then it's only 4 nuts and out comes the engine. It should only take about 20 minutes unless all the bots are rusted on. On bajas you can just pull the jack and engine straight back and then it will look like this. 

 You can see the clutch on the engine. I am going to transfer that over to the other engine and hopefully the exhaust also.  I am going to try to get this on the road as cheap as possible. The exhaust looks pretty rough so I will evaluate it as I am cleaning it up. Hopefully it will work so I don't have to spend any money there.

 The trans looks OK from what I can see. The throwout bearing is smooth and should work just fine. I will change the aft seal in the trans while I have the engine out and also the front seal on the new engine. I keep some extra of those so I already have them.

I wish the body on this bug wasn't so rusty. I can't see putting a lot of money into it because it is so rusty. I think I will get it running and driving good mechanically and drive it in the winter so my other bug can stay inside the garage. This baja should go better in the snow and I won't care about all the salt and crap on the roads that will get on it. In the summer when I am driving Ed I may even spend some time practising my bodywork skills on this bug. I should get plenty of chances to cut and weld in new panels, but then again if I can find a better bug for dirt cheap I may just transfer over the baja kit and go from there. Time will tell.