|
Replaced the rear main seal today and thought I would share the pain! It's a 89 240 wagon with 180K miles and started leaking a while back. I put it off as long as I could but the leak suddenly increased and I was afraid that the oil hitting the exhaust would catch on fire.
So, I bought a rear main seal, a front seal for the tranny and a case of ATF and headed off to a co-workers house. This guy has a really good shop set up in his garage: air tools, floor jacks, tons of tools, parts washer etc.
Removing the tranny was pretty straight forward but very messy since everything was covered in oil. We removed the exhaust pipe from the manifold and that gave us a ton of room. The driveshaft bolts were removed from the tranny output shaft and the driveshaft was moved to one side. The kickdown cable, overdrive solenoid wire and fill tube were removed. For some reason, the fill tube nut at the pan was super tight. It took a cheater bar on the wrench to break it loose. The oil was drained and the cooler lines were removed. All fluid lines/ports were capped or plugged so we wouldn't have oil dripping on us. The crossmember was removed and the engine/tranny tilted down to provide access to the mating bolts. Several long extensions and an air ratchet and the tranny was ready to remove. My co-worker built a nice fixture for his floorjack, it had a strap that wrapped around the tranny and secured it to the jack. A quick tug and the tranny was out! The flexplate was next and this is where we screwed up. My buddy (yep, I'm going to blame him!) marked the crankshaft and the outer plate on the flexplate. However, he didn't realize that there was a flexplate AND another outer plate. When we removed the flexplate, no mark on the flexplate! The rear main seal leak could be seen clearly. The oil was running out at the low point of the seal and running along the oil pan flange to the pax side of the engine bay. A hole was drilled in the seal and a sheetmetal screw was driven into the seal. A pair of pliers quickly removed the seal.
All the hardware went into the parts washer and everything was cleaned and inspected. The sealing surface on the crank was nice and smooth and the new seal was installed. We pulled the torque converter and replaced the tranny seal. Since I had left my Volvo repair book at home, we made our best guess at positioning the flexplate. The reat of this reinstallation was pretty much the reverse of the removal. Well, the engine wouldn't start so we knew right away that we had the flexplate indexed wrong. Using a timing light, we were able to determine that the ignition was firing 90 deg advanced! Total time so far: about 3 and a half hours. Time for lunch and to ponder the situation.
After lunch, we did the whole thing all over again! We repositioned the flexplate and just to make sure, we started up the engine! No exhaust, no tranny and the car was up on 4 jackstands. What a sweet sound when it started up! Everything was reinstalled and the second time around only took about 2 and a half hours.
Drove the car home and no big clouds of smoke! Will let the car sit overnight and check for puddles in the morning.
I was going to attempt this repair in my garage with just hand tools. After doing the job twice with air tools and a nice shop, I wouldn't even think about trying this job at my place.
In closing, REMEMBER TO MARK THE FLEXPLATE!!!! Cheers and I'm off for a beer!
|
