problem seperating engine from manual tranny
 

For anyone that read my other thread i decided to pull the engine. seeing as ive never seen the car run i just couldn't put all that money and work into the head and not know the condition of everything else.

After lots of prep work i was ready to pull the engine. i loosened the engine to tranny bolts, hooked the engine up to the lift and then removed the engine to tranny bolts. heres where i ran into trouble: i had this brilliant idea that instead of unbolting the four bolts on each motor mount that go into the block i could just undo the nut on the large bolt coming out of the rubber part of the center of the motor mount and the motor mount would split in to and the block would come out with half of the motor mount. well it literially split in two, the rubber snapped. in order to do this we had to lift the engine up very high to try and get it over these bolts before we could pull the engine away from the transmission (manual) during this procces of trying to manuver the engine up and down and forward it started to pour on us, we got soaking wet and where freezing.

once we got the engine off of the motor mounts we lowered it back down to try and pull it off of the transmission with the engine and tranny level but soon gave up for the day because of the conditions. we stuck 2x4's between the two parts of the motor mount and just let it sit.

so the question for anyone thats pulled just the motor and not the transmission before is: is there a trick to getting the engine seperated from the transmission. it seperates about 2 inches and thats it. do i just need to keep the engine and tranny level and try and work it forward or is there a step i am missing.

any help is greatly appreciated, especially before Saterday as we will be giving it another try when the weekend comes around.

I think you have to drop the mounts for the tranny to bring it down just a little. then wiggle them apart or something. That's how I did it on a 4 runner.

i do not beleive the transmission has any supports it goes up and down rather freely. we had it supported by a jack. but i guess we just gotta keep everything kinda low, and wiggle and pull till it comes apart

I ran into the same problem as you did on my supra when I did my tranny swap from auto to standard. Now you said that the tranny has seperated away from the engine about two inches. That is good your half way there, but the problem is that no repair manual tells you more then "unbolt the tranny from the engine". There are no supports on the tranny but what there is is two flaps on the side of the standard tranny. You have to take those flaps off and look inside the tranny. You should see the pressure plate. Now on the pressure plate there is 6 bolts that hold it to the flywheel unfourtunatly (one of toyota's wonderful inventions), but you can't get to all of them at once. So you have to rotate the whole assembly to get them all off. Make sure that you have support under the tranny because once those bolts are out the tranny is heavy and will come out fast. Like I said I had the same problem and my auto teacher couldn't even figure it out, so I had to troubleshoot my self. Please let me know if this info helps at all, im pretty sure I answered your question from what I read. Good luck.

thank you oh so much boombastic,
i might have been out there trying to pull them apart for quite a few more hours. i will try again on saterday when i have a full day and a few freinds to help out. you said you ran into these hidden bolts when taking out an automatic but i assume they are on the manual transmissions as well?

my auto teacher also didnt know anything about this, i guess cause this is probably the only car set up like that. and like you said it sure wouldve been nice if one of the manuals said something about this, they all say to remove the engine and tranny together but then it just says to remove transmission from engine after its out, nothing about those bolts. not to get off topic but do/did you go to a tech school as part of high school or do a program after high school? im doing it as part of high school and am lovin it.
thanks again

easyest thing to do is to remove the E- clip from the the clutch fork and it should come out then....to me , removing the clutch as in the instructions while in the transmision seems to be ridiculous.....but you can fin thm here...MK3 TSRM On-Line

Well im glad I could help. Dont worry about the off topic thing, I never attended a tech school for automotive. In my grade 12 year I had a lot of auto classes and a lot of cool stuff went down like my tranny swap on my supra and my friend but a sr-20 motor in his nissan 240sx. I ended up being the drag car driver for my school which was bitchen cause you can't beet straight line speed with a 454. So anyways I never did the high school program cause I had a lot of good going for me. I wanted to but I would have been giving up some cool stuff. Anyways I go to a tech school now for Heavy Duty/Commercial Transport mechanics, but I love tickering with cars and my supra is my first kind of project car that i've been working on to make it steller looking and fast-assed. Good luck on saturday.

Hey everyone,
ive been through some recent family trouble that delayed me in getting it out but its finally out.
I should have listened to everyone on this forum but i like to push my luck.
anyone thinking like me PLEASE JUST TAKE THE ENGINE AND TRANSMISSION OUT AS A UNIT, seperating them in the car is a complete pain and not worth it at all.
I ended up bolting the transmission back up to the engine, removing everything from the tranny, which was way quicker and easyer then i thought, and pulling the two together.
anyways just wanted to update and thank everyone for there help. now i get to start rebuilding, unless i decide to get another engine.