Tips & Tricks

I've been meaning to add some tips that I either found online or figured out as I went along with recent work. Here are two:

(1) When removing a harmonic balancer you can put the crank pulley bolts back into the balancer and then put a pry bar between them to hold the balancer still. Then loosen and remove the large balancer center bolt with a large breaker bar.

This procedure works well, but hopefully the bolt is not rusted
or seized into the crank snout.

(2) There are a number of ways to keep track of water pump bolts when replacing the water pump, but the best solution I found was to find a water pump template online and print it out. :-) I wish I could find the template I used so I could link to it, and give credit, but I can't find it...

I used the template at left to hold the stock bolts.
The template at right holds the new ARP bolts I am using instead.
Both paper templates are taped to a cardboard box to hold the bolts easily.