I was curious to see if anyone's heard of this method of holding the crank/engine while trying to loosen the crank pulley bolt. I am about to change my timing belt (and about to order the moroso wrench), and a co-worker of mine had mentioned how they used to do it with aircraft engines.

They would set a cylinder to bdc, the piston about to begin its compression stroke. The spark plug was removed, and they dropped a small-diameter rope down the hole. The rope was feed in until the cylinder was filled with the rope. The crank was then rotated and the rope began to compress in the cylinder. At some point, the cylinder can't compress the rope anymore, and then they would loosen the bolt. After they were done, they would reverse the crank and pull out the rope.

I was suprised to hear how they did it, but I would be very scared to try it on my Teg. I think I'll order the wrench regardless.

Just wonderin if anyone else has heard something like this, or even tried it.

 

Sure. That's how I get the flywheel off my lawnmower engine. I haven't done that on a car yet...

 

My only concern would be, as you're compressing the rope inside the cylinder, what if you come far enough around that the valves begin to open? With as much force as you're going to need to break the crank bolt loose, you'd certainly bend the valve first.

When I used to have to do this without the pully tool, I just removed the clutch acces cover and stuck something in the ring gear teeth on the flywheel.

 

Someone else just mentioned to me that there is also a possibility of damaging your bearings, since the crank/rod is absorbing the load.

 

dude get a strap wrench at sears for like 10 bucks and socket the strap wrench will hold the pulley so it dosnt move

 

Some of the pulleys take a sick amount of tourque to crack though. All my weight 160lbs and a 6 foot fence post on a breaker bar broke the breaker bar before it cracked. Thats not uncommon either. You wont be able to hold the strap wrench if its stuck and if you could the wrench would break. Personally I would just go to a local shop and give em 10 bucks to loosten it with a big *** impact before I bought the wrench for 60 which would not have helped mine anyways.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by omahaturbocivic &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">... Personally I would just go to a local shop and give em 10 bucks to loosten it with a big *** impact...</TD></TR></TABLE>
That's what I did when I changed my timing belt.

In fact, the little corner shop must have been used to working on rustangs or something. Told me no normal mortal can change the timing belt on an Acura, especially DOHC. I asked if he'd loosen the bolt for me anyway, please... Then he didn't even charge me anything. Actually, he was a kinda nice guy.

 

I'm not clear if your engine is still in your car or sitting on the ground, but if its on the ground, a good way of cracking the crank pulley bolt loose is by holding the flywheel in place by making some kind of jig as seen here:




doing this along with keeping the block in place (somehow), will allow you to use a breaker bar to crack that damn 19mm crank pulley nut...

 

the alternative to the crank pulley wrench would require a two person, assuming that the engine is still in the car. remove the flywheel access cover, have one person stick a flat screwdriver in one of the flywheels teeth and have the other person break the torque off the bolt. simple.......done.

 

LOL, I work at Sears tool dep. that Sears strap wrench, is for opening jars and stuff, no way it would take over 200lbs of pressure from me jumping on it. Here is how I did it. I bought a chain wrench(only store that sells it is Napa I think), wrapped an old drive belt around the pulley and put the chain wrench on that, as the chain wrench goes up it hits one of the suspension arms and gets stuck, I put my 23inch Craftsman brakerbar on it so that it extends from under the front bumper, jumper on it a few times and it went.