Greetings. Figured it was time to join the forums, and what better reason than needing some advice?
Seriously though, I can usually google this stuff and try to figure it out on my own with pretty reasonable success, but this one has got me stumped, and I'm unfortunately on a time limit to fix my car.
The short of it - 94 LX, 3.0 V6, water pump started leaking, wore out timing belt and snapped it. Utilizing Allpar's great walkthrough on replacement of timing belt, and while I'm in there, the water pump.
I'm all the way down to just under the timing belt housing, was pulling water pump bolts, and hit a snag (snag is illustrated in 2nd photo).
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Here's the snag.
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The rusty colored horizontal bracket is blocking the top water pump bolt from being removed. The bracket has three bolts, one of which you can't see out of the frame on the upper left. I was able to remove the far right hand bolt, as you can see, but the other two are locked down tightly. You can't get anything more than an open ended wrench around them, and one of those is already starting to strip out the middle bolt.
Tried vise-grips, not enough room between the engine and the fender well.
My question is this...I've been going over and over the parts I've pulled, and their arrangement on the engine, and I can't tell that this bracket really does anything. My idea is, to carefully cut it just to the right of the middle angled bolt with a hacksaw, pull off the piece that I was able to get the bolt out of, put it back on when I'm done. The only thing I can think of is that maybe this bracket blocks debris (like a wrench or a socket end) from dropping into the timing valley when it's all sealed up, but even that might be a stretch.
I'm going to soak the bolts in WD40 overnight and see if they give, but the only other option is to remove the entire intake manifold, which is highly, highly unnecessary.
Open to suggestions, thank you for reading.
Seriously though, I can usually google this stuff and try to figure it out on my own with pretty reasonable success, but this one has got me stumped, and I'm unfortunately on a time limit to fix my car.
The short of it - 94 LX, 3.0 V6, water pump started leaking, wore out timing belt and snapped it. Utilizing Allpar's great walkthrough on replacement of timing belt, and while I'm in there, the water pump.
I'm all the way down to just under the timing belt housing, was pulling water pump bolts, and hit a snag (snag is illustrated in 2nd photo).
Here's the snag.
The rusty colored horizontal bracket is blocking the top water pump bolt from being removed. The bracket has three bolts, one of which you can't see out of the frame on the upper left. I was able to remove the far right hand bolt, as you can see, but the other two are locked down tightly. You can't get anything more than an open ended wrench around them, and one of those is already starting to strip out the middle bolt.
Tried vise-grips, not enough room between the engine and the fender well. My question is this...I've been going over and over the parts I've pulled, and their arrangement on the engine, and I can't tell that this bracket really does anything. My idea is, to carefully cut it just to the right of the middle angled bolt with a hacksaw, pull off the piece that I was able to get the bolt out of, put it back on when I'm done. The only thing I can think of is that maybe this bracket blocks debris (like a wrench or a socket end) from dropping into the timing valley when it's all sealed up, but even that might be a stretch.
I'm going to soak the bolts in WD40 overnight and see if they give, but the only other option is to remove the entire intake manifold, which is highly, highly unnecessary.
Open to suggestions, thank you for reading.
