This was day two of the operation. Myself having a straight job, I managed to miss most of the shit work, and got involved where the fun stuff was involved, i.e. cutting metal with fire. As you can see, the motor has been exposed. The floorboards around the sides of the motor have been torched out to give access to the motor mounts. I think the motor mounts were the only thing attached to the motor that was actually removed the proper way. The heads, intake manifold, and anything else we could unhook has been removed to reduce weight, since at this point we were entertaining the fanciful notion of the three of us picking up the engine and carrying it out to the truck. Needless to say this was Ryan's idea. Aaron and I exchanged worried glances, but knew better than to contradict Ryan when he's rolling. Anyway, through the creative application of the torch, Aaron is here removing more floorboard, because we decided that while we were at it, we might as well take the tranny too. This necessitated torching through a fairly substantial cross member in the frame, but hey, you do what you gotta do. I don't know if Ryan's Dad Frank ever did figure out what happened to that entire tank of oxygen....

Okay, this is AFTER we tried to move the engine by hand. To our credit, we moved it several inches before I invoked the always handy "Bite Me" clause and refused to try again. I didn't want to end up in the hospital with my leg sewed to my stomach because Ryan wanted a new motor in his car. So, being the creative rednecks that we are, we hatched a plan. Actually, this was Ryan's idea again, because it was the best one of the whole operation. It had all the classic elements: Style, Function, and being Really Damn Cool to Look At. Not to mention afro-engineered to beat fuck-all. We're talking, of course, about the TOWER OF POWER!!! Here Aaron is sunroofing the van to allow us to hang the chain fall down through the roof to hook onto the engine.

For the unknowing, or possibly educated, flatlanders in our midst, I shall explain the tower of power. It consists of three cedar poles, lashed together into a pyramid (see figure A, left). This is the platform from which heavy lifting is accomplished. Now, the tree-hugging, new age types of the west coast, around the early 80's, were delving into the mystical, healing powers of pyramids. Hell, we'd been doing that up here for years! Drive around any rural area, and you'd see two or three cars, cedar pole pyramid in place, engine dangling overhead, awaiting the powers of the heavens to concentrate through the pyramid, resulting in a valve job or something similar. (No, it doesn't work, but I think it's something to do with the climate) Here, the tower is in place, and Ryan is inspecting the mechanism for functionality. (Ryan is our resident expert on everything, and I don't catch him wrong very often. And when I do, I gloat about it, so I'd remember)

Now this Tower O' Power was a little more hokey than most... For one thing, it's supposed to be solid cedar poles...these were fabbed up from several ancient rafters, studs, and logs found in the junk pile at Ryan's house. Kinda scary stuff, but it held. Some ratchet straps were also employed to hold the rig together. The chainfall is suspended from the apex, down through the opening in the roof. (which Aaron is expanding a little more. We love our torches.) So here's the plan...hook onto the motor...lift it up in the air (we'd disconnected it from the tranny and manhandled that outside by hand. The motor was gonna need some coaxing tho), turn it sideways, so it would sit perpendicular to the frame. Then, raise it up again, get it swinging, back the Ranger up next to it, swing it out thru the door of the van, and into the bed of the Ranger, dropping it with the chainfall directly into the bed of the truck. Sound ridiculous? Sound improbable? Sound practically stupid? Who cares. We ain't listening.

Let me tell ya...you can mock our lack of breeding, our propensity for junk collection, our complete lack of social graces, but by God, when we come up with a cockamamie plan, we pull thru with the biggest pile of blind-ass luck that you can have this side of the big river. Not only did our plan actually work (Don't get me wrong, we were surprised too), but none of us got seriously hurt! I think Ryan did save my life at one point, since when we were removing some more stubborn pieces of motor attachments (stuff that was bolted on the front of the motor, AC pump, various hoses, etc) I was wielding a pair of tin snips with fairly good redneck resolve, and as I hacked into a fairly sizeable rubber pipe, it began to hiss and emit some kind of gas. I stood there puzzled for a second, at which point Ryan came running at me, bulldogged me, and pushed me away from the van, yelling something to the tune of "Don't breathe that shit in!!!!". Naturally, being an old van, with an A/C unit, this thing had more than it's share of Freon, a substance now banned in the US 'cause it eats away at the ozone like piss on a snowman. Also, if you breathe it in, it displaces the oxygen in your lungs, and you expire. That's bad. So we let it spew its loving payload into the air, content that we were making the state a little warmer through the miracle of global warming, and continued on our merry way.

Anyway, like I began before, the plan worked perfectly. We hoisted the engine up on the chainfall, listening the the timbers of the tower o' power creak ominously. Aaron ran the chainfall from inside the van, and Ryan and I pushed the engine toward the passenger side as far as we could. Once we were ready, we let it go, and as it went sailing by us, we pushed it from the back as it swung on it's chain tether thru the roof, arced out thru the driver's door, and swung neatly into the bed of the Danger Ranger. Aaron spun the chain, and dropped the motor right in the bed. Slicker than deer guts on a doorknob. We were stoked. We couldn't have pulled that off any better even if we'd had several beers in us. So, like the settlers of old, we proudly dragged the fresh kill back to the homestead and hung it in the garage. Ryan poses with the trophy three-hundred-and-two pointer.

This is Ryan's new project...a '69 Ford Bronco. Did I mention his Mustang is a '69 also? He goes to school at Embry Riddle Aeronautical in Prescott, Arizona. He picked this little gem up for the princely sum of $1000, and towed it home. I won't go into the adventures of getting the thing back to Arizona, you can go to his site and read about it if you want. Needless to say, after much work and tinkering, it's a mean four-wheelin' machine. I can't wait for him to drag it back to Maine. Here he is, doing what he and I do best, puddle jumping. Always a crowd pleaser. (Except that his roof leaks something fierce and he ended up with a small pond inside, most of which was in his lap after this little stunt. Oh well.)

Ryan also managed to dump the tranny out of the Bronco, mostly because he ran it for several weeks with water in it as opposed to gear oil. Anyway, it got stuck in second gear and refused to move. So Ryan and his compadres drained it, opened it up, and found large chunks of gears and synchros on the bottom of the tranny. D'oh!! Anyway, a junkyard tranny was found, up here in Maine, taken to our local tranny guy and given the clean bill of health, and then shipped to AZ where Ryan and Tye, the supreme holder of the wrench sessions, swapped it in, and now the Bronco is rolling again. But here's Ryan, working with his typical methodical and painstaking nature on his new tranny and t-case. They also fabbed a twin-stick shifter for the t-case while they were at it. Fun fun fun!

Ryan wheelin' with the Bronco. Note the head out the window. Textbook Four-Wheelin Form. This picture is before the 3 inches of lift, used 33" meats, and a paint job. I'm currently harassing him for pictures, but haven't gotten any yet.