Obstacle #1

The drive to Humble today was full of excitement because the plan for the day was to remove the engine. Upon our arrival, Adam gave us a quick lesson on the parts of a conventional gasoline engine. It was vital that we got this lesson because we needed to know what exactly we needed to take out and how. We weren’t really sure how difficult it would be to remove the engine, but quickly discovered that it is no easy task. Our first plan of attack was dividing the work between us and have each of us take something out.

One of the big hurdles we faced was figuring out what nuts and bolts held what in place, as we wanted to be as efficient as possible. The car being manufactured in 1990, the engine bay was pretty rusty and many of the nuts and bolts were stuck. So it took some serious effort just to unscrew some of the components.

While half of us were working on the engine bay, the other half was taking apart the back seat of the car. Supra, being a coupe, the rear seats weren’t of any meaningful use. So we decided to use that space and the now empty spare tire well for batteries. The extra space in the back and the engine bay will give us sufficient room for batteries.  

The day was coming to an end and we still weren’t able to get the engine out. We used an engine hoist to pull out the engine, but there was still something holding it down. To rectify that we started looking at the car from underneath it to figure out what exactly was going on. We made sure that the transmission was completely disconnected from the engine bay, however the engine still refused to budge. Second we completely disconnected the exhaust system, yet there was still something holding it down. We had to leave soon but emotion was running high as we all were making our effort to find out what the cause maybe. We did make some progress but unfortunately we ran out of time. That being said we are super excited to tackle this problem tomorrow and remove the engine.