Austin Healey Engine removal

Christmas break, for most, is the time when college students visit home and get to see their families and eat some home cooked meals. Christmas break for me is all that and some classic car repair! Last spring my dad bought a 1965 Austin Healey Sprite to restore. Its a tiny British  roadster that rolled out of the same factory as the MG midget.

Not my picture but this is the car

Being away at school meant Im not much involved with the car but this winter while myself and my brother were back from school we decided to pull the engine and transmission to further move along the teardown. It took a few hours to disconnect the bumper subframe, remove the radiator, headers, carbs and distributor and also to label every single hose, wire and cable going to the engine and transmission. After that we disconnected all the cables and hoses and started working out the engine mounts. Its luckily a small 1.1L engine with a good sized engine bay so there was plenty of room to work with. Once the engine mounts and transmission mounts were out we disconnected the shift linkage and positioned the engine hoist. It took a couple tries to get the chain position on the engine just right because it would need to first tilt the engine and transmission ~30 degrees upward then move upward and out of the engine bay. After a slow removal we had the engine free and could unbolt the tranny, remove the clutch and starter motor then call it a day and unthaw our hands. 

Using a gopro I time-lapsed the removal process:

Lessons Learned: Planning is everything! Labeling everything was a tedious task because I was sure I would remember where everything went but now, just a month later, I know I would be very lost had I not done that. Also we overlooked the speedometer cable that was hooked up to the transmission and accidentally broke it during the removal so it will have to be replaced. The connection was in a hard to reach spot so we planned on getting the engine a small ways out of the bay and then disconnecting the cable because it would be much easier to reach. This got forgotten about until it was too late. So I learned to be constantly double checking what I was doing.