Still brings that wry smile to my face thinking about it and sitting reading and writing on here,to be fair to all reading this and stripping their donor,s I am as Ronnie says a proffesional mechanic (£50 inthe post) with all the facillitys and silly amounts of tools etc so I admire the efforts of those who do not have the gear I have and do things on drive's etc as there is no way on this earth I would lay on the ground pulling cars apart.

Well I made some more progress today, lots of masking tape stuck to everything with numbers written on it for everything I've disconnected. Slow going but making good progress :) Lots of the rubber pipes are in bad shape though, most have holes or rotten completely and barely hanging on by a thread. Amazing the engine would still run like this let alone pass an MOT a few months ago :S

watch out for the masking tape dropping off or the ink fading.

The 4pot sierra's are easy cars to work on, and pulling the cars with Type 9's are easier still.

TT

Short cut
 

I've strippped 4 sierra's so far.
If you have no particular plans with the body, the best you can do is to remove the radiator and cut away the beams between the headlights.
This gives you "full access" to the engine and makes it easy to remove the complete engine-and-transmission.

Eddy

I take it cutting/removing the beams and radiator won't affect the stability of it when i put it onto axle stands to remove the stuff off the bottom?

It will be fine the front chassis legs are very strong.

TT

Kinda stuck again. Managed to get what I think is the distributor off (small box under the manifold with 4 x red wires connection into the oppisite side of the engine at the top) and started working on trying to get the 6xbolts off for the manifold and one of the nuts has got stuck 1/2 way up the thread. Whenever I turn the nut now the bolt turns with it. I've tried holding the bolt with a pliers but cant seem to get a tight enough grip on it. I've also tried spraying liberally with wd40. Any ideas how to get it off?

Why are you taking it off?

TT

Well the engine has done 95k so was planning on stripping the whole thing down to clean it up and replace anything that was in bad shape and thought it would make getting the engine out easier to remove all of the parts attached to the engine.

did it run ok beforehand?

TT