HELP! Rear main seal

Trying to replace rear main seal. Dropped pan, removed cap, loosened all other caps. It still has the original rope style seal, so the upper half won't budge! Tried needle nose, brass punch, etc etc.
how the heck am I suppose to get this out? Looking like I will be pulling motor after all...
SO BUMMED.
Punch just buries in the rope, needle nose just tear off small pieces.
Any advice?

 

You loosen the other main caps? Drop the crank a mm or two onto the loosened caps.

I have used a piece of 3/16" - 1/4" wooden dowel to drive out the old seal.

 

http://cdn1.bigcommerce.com/server4.../27000__06357__00962.1360953669.1280.1280.JPG

 

Yes, loosened all the caps. Will the crank drop with rods attached?

 

A drywall screw in to the end of the seal can provide enough friction to pull it out.

 

Lee, so funny you mentioned that! My buddy is a mechanic and he told me the same thing tonight. Killer idea, but still didn't work. The rope is torn back about 3/4" already, so screw starts to hit the curve in block before it can bite.
might try ordering the Sneaky Pete, if that doesn't work...there's gonna be a smoking deal on a 69 cj5!

 

one thing that you haven't thought about is the crank wont drop if transmission is still in place . even with rear bearing caps loose . that's just my opinion

 

Handled it!
Went out this morning with fresh eyes. Took some time, but the "sneaky pete" gave me the idea...drywall screw and dykes!
Thanks guys.

 

Way to go.

 

I would have gone Sneaky Pete Seal Tool but couldn't find one locally, and really wanted rear main buttoned up today.
thank you PeteL and everyone else too!
should see what was in the bottom of my oil pan...hard white plastic pieces and SLUDGE. Cleaned everything up in the pan, now gonna pull intake and valve covers and do the same. At least ill sleep better knowing it's much cleaner inside. Even the oil pickup was a mess...

 

Anything I have touched on my "new to me" 66 thus far has been original... your last post makes me wonder what is hidden inside, a tad scary.

Pierre

 

Wanted to ask you Tim, or anyone willing to reply...when I pulled the rear main cap I really inspected the bearing, and yes, it looks like crud. I can feel a grove or two with my finger nail. I am cleaning the oil pan, sump, and pickup and putting it back together. Up top I am pulling the valve covers and intake and doing the same thing, not only to make it look much better but to get all the sludge out that I can. Not gonna touch the heads.
my question is, with all the gunk gone and a healthy diet of fresh oil here on out, what can I expect from this motor?
what will be a side effect from the beat bearings?
Keep in mind it runs strong and fires right up. I don't think this motor has ever been loved or opened up. There was about a 1/2" of SLUDGE in bottom of oil pan, and I can reach inside valve cover with my finger and pull sludge off the inside of valve cover. I have no experience with the dauntless.
Are they tough? Will it run strong for many more years if all other things are good?
thank you in advance for your inputs!!!
BTW, it had 79,000 miles on odometer.

 

Tim will probably chime in tomorrow , but for now I'll take a shot at giving you my $.002 ...........there really is no way of telling how long it will last, If the main bearings are all grooved up, there is a good chance that the rods are the same and the cylinders walls are also suffering from the dirty oil that perhaps has never been changed! The damage is already done , hard to tell whether or not you could save much. The cranks & rods when ground will go to .030 undersized and the bore to .060 over-sized. I would guess the oil pump and timing gears are also suffering along with the valve train & rocker assembly.
Bottom line you could take it apart right now and after measuring everything still find out it cannot be repaired! The choice is yours , I would probably just run it till it breaks or starts burning so much oil it's a hazard , does not sound like there is much to lose.

 

Yep, gonna run it til I can't. Don't want to spend summer rebuilding it, want to spend summer cruising pacific coast hgwy with my wife and two boys. Want to eat sandwiches on top of local trails we have around here. Want to jump curbs and push shopping carts out of my way.
besides the sludge in bottom of pan, I found a handful of hard white chopped up plastic pieces. Tim made a good suggestion that they might be an old timing gear that disintegrated. Back to "no luv" from PO. Once I figure out how to post pictures I am gonna share.
i just didn't know how finicky these old dauntless motors are. Seem tuff to me, cuz if you saw what I saw, then saw how it runs...pretty impressive!
thanks for chiming in!

 

The plastic could be timing gear or if they look like they were round and hollow at one time could be valve seals...........Good Luck!

 

Yeah, the sludge is likely due to neglect, ie never changing the oil. Supposedly an ineffective PCV system or constant low engine temperature can keep crankcase moisture high and cause the oil to sludge out too.

If it were mine, I would put it back together and run it. I'd do several oil changes in quick succession. Motor oils made for diesel engines (Delo, Rotella) are particularly high in detergent, so that would be one option to try and clean out some of the remaining sludge.

The bearings are designed to capture particles in the oil and embed them in the soft bearing metal. As long as I had good hot idle oil pressure, I would not worry about the bearing's condition. But I expect you should be running a 195F thermostat in this engine.

Are they tough? Yes, I think so. Maybe not as tough as some other designs of the era, but plenty durable. At 79K, it should have a timing chain and gears change, if it has not.

This might help with the pics - http://www.fsjnetwork.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=1152

 

"Motor oils made for diesel engines (Delo, Rotella) are particularly high in detergent, so that would be one option to try and clean out some of the remaining sludge."

Interesting, Tim. I was given to think old engines were better with a non-detergent, so as not to disturb the sludge and avoid having it migrate. Your thoughts?

 

Well, I'm not that old, but there is said to be some risk changing from ND to modern detergent oil at the time of changeover. The supposed risk is that a piece of varnish will flake off and plug one of the oil galleries. But ND varnish is not sludge, AFAIK. I have seen engines that have been run a long time on ND oil, and they have a hard, brown coating, not a goo or gel. I would use detergent oil - maybe there's a risk... don't know.

 

Thanks Tim.

 

PeteL , that posture did hold true years back in the late 70's through the 80's.........once a HD truck was started on a particular oil and it was happy it pretty much spent it's life there. We used to have an oil analysis done every 100,000 miles ( back in the day when you rolled bearings in a NTC Cummins BC 350 every 250,000 miles) On the advice of the Standard / Chevron Oil folks who were local in the Bay Area and we used allot of there products and also made the Delo 100-400 series oils with the 400 being the high detergent product we switched over one engine to the 400 series after a bearing change.........Bad Idea.........didn't last a few hundred miles and started smoking profusely! Chevron had us pull the motor and replaced it. Seems the High Detergent oil basically washed everything down including the cylinder bores that did not allow the old rings to seal anymore.........

Fast forward to 1993 and we bought our first electronic fuel injection motor the Cummins N-14.........Wow what a difference the early FI electronic injection made........do to the early manual fuel pump motors and the antiquated fuel delivery systems used that would over fuel the motor and wash down cylinder walls and contaminate the oil with burnt hydrocarbons...........most if not all of our oiling and fuel contamination problems went away...........now instead of rolling in bearings every 250k and replacing sleeves , pistons and cylinder heads we had motors in the fleet approaching a million miles and never had the heads or pan off..........