Morgan Engine removal

It was already dark when I got to the garage tonight. All I wanted to do is a bit of clean up and head home early. But after twenty minutes, all tools and parts found their right place and my workbench had the second wipe.
I decided to do a test drive with the Morgan around the block. Before taking the engine out – I wanted to be sure that I still have the clutch issue. And sure enough – just after a few hundred meters you could smell the clutch. You can feel that the engine revs up – but the power is not getting to the rear wheels.

When I got back to the garage, I thought that it cannot hurt to take of some auxiliaries and preparing the removal. The work on the right engine side is simple and went super quick. Battery out (just in case), draining the coolant and detaching the fuel lines and cables from the carb was the first step. Oil pressure line removing some coolant hoses already cleared the right side.

On the left engine side, I had to disconnect the distributor from the coil, some cables and a few more coolant hoses. The exhaust manifold followed, which gave me good access to the starter and alternator. I worked carefully but all-in-all this only took 45min. All that was left is to get out the engine hoist, hook up the block and remove the bolts from the gearbox tunnel and engine mounts. This was also super easy – I used cooper-ease on most bolts when I assembled the car and this clearly paid-off now.

Wiggling the engine from the gearbox was not as easy. I supported the Ford T9 gearbox with a jack-stand and eventually was able to separate the engine and gearbox. I did not take of the cowl and using the balancer I tilted the engine all the way backward – which left millimeters of clearance on both the cowl and gearbox. After a bit more than two hours the small 1.6l Ford CVH engine was on my portable workbench.

Of course, I was eager to see what the clutch looks like. My expectation was to see a clearly damaged clutch and/or clutch release bearing. But this is not the case. There are some wear marks on the disk – but by far not as bad as for example the one I changed on my daughter Alfa Romeo Mito a few weeks back. The release bearing however does spin easily anymore. In any case – the clutch cable adjustment I tried to fix three times now clearly remains an issue.