Removing a 5.3 liter out of a Yukon

Saturday we got to work pulling the engine out of the Yukon. We were too busy to capture the whole thing in pictures but here are some of the ones I took. Here Ian is pulling some of the top things off the engine.

 The intake was a nasty mess. It makes me want to look at mine in my truck to see if it looks like this one. The new engine we are putting in looks a lot better than this one.

 I have said this a lot on this blog and I will say it again. When you are doing a big job like this take lots of pictures because when it comes time to put everything back together you can reference them and remember how it all went. This is what this picture is. I took a picture of the wiring plug so we could remember how it was routed.

 There are a ton of wire connectors to remove off of  these engines. It seems like there are about 4 times as many plugs as a there are in a smaller foreign cars engine.

Remove all the front stuff like radiator, fan shroud, fan etc... We are just about done at least in the front of the engine.

 We decided that it would be much easier to remove the front radiator support so we wouldn't have to lift the engine as high up when we removed it. It all came apart very easy with bolts. GM did this one right by not welding it all together.

 We got to this point and then jacked up the car. Under the car we removed the exhaust, starter, torque converter bolts and the lower bell housing bolts. We lowered the car and then looked for the upper bell housing bolts. They are pretty much buried and so Ian called his buddy at the Chevy dealership. He said we needed to remove the intake manifold to get to them. Soooo........

 We removed the intake manifold and then we were able to remove the upper bolts. Here Ian is having a great time cramming his hand in between the engine and the firewall to remove the bolts. I am always telling him I will make him famous. Here he is famous in this blog.

The heads on these engines are interesting.

 Make sure you put a jack underneath the transmission at this point. We are ready to pull it. We had to pry the engine and trans apart from each other but it went really smooth.

 Here it is on it's way out. It was really nice being able to just pull it forward and out instead of jacking it up to the sky to clear the grill.

 And it is out. The engine bay looks like a mess at this point.

The heads on the engine are pretty grimy. This engine has 200,000 miles on it though.

 It's hard to see in this picture but you there is water in the right side head. The new engine looks a ton better and is really clean. It should be a good engine.

 The wrecking yard that we bought the engine from requires a new oil pan gasket, valve cover gaskets, front and rear seal, spark plugs, water pump and you need to inspect the timing chain to have their warranty not voided. We are changing the oil pan gasket here.

 It is super clean under the pan.

 More pictures.

We installed the pan with a new gasket, flipped the engine back over and replaced the spark plugs, drilled out the broken bolts in the head and now we are waiting on parts to arrive from rock auto. All in all it was a pretty good, productive weekend. The goal is to get the new engine in next Saturday. Hopefully the parts will arrive and they will be the right parts. This isn't the best time of the year to be getting things shipped fast but we have our fingers crossed. Check back in a week and see if we can burn the tires with the new engine in this Yukon.