hawk911

well they are, really!

RicardoD

Dropping the C2 Tiptronic which should be simpler.

LouZ

Ricardo

You are in for a TREAT! It was scary, fun, frustrating, exhilarating, and finally rewarding.

RicardoD

Lou,
I recognize the pictures. I bookmarked your thread for reference. Thank you for the encouragement. I always do something stupid but usually not with any great harm. By chance I am also hooking up with a fellow Rennlister tomorrow at my house and turns out he has dropped an engine on his tip before.

Lemass Automotive

If you take your time and take pictures of everything you disconnect (believe me you will forget the route of pipe work and electrics) then you will be fine. It's actually quite easy when you break it down into sections.

Someone on here had a very good step by step guide that I followed. It's bookmarked on my work computer. I'll get the link tomorrow. It's for a c4 but is pretty much the same.

LouZ

I did a stupid thing right at the end of the reassembly! Cost me $1500 more to replace the TIP!

I have a bunch of pix if you need something, and as Lemass stated, take lots of pictures!

RicardoD

Lou,

What was your $1500 stupid thing? I can make a note to myself to not do that!

LouZ

Reinstalling the TIP to the engine goes against logic.....but is, cryptically, explained in the workshop manual. Basically, you have to put the torque converter on the TIP shaft (not bolt it to the engine flex plate). Then you slide the assembly on to the engine, then (here's the odd part) you bolt the torque converter to the flex plate THRU the starter mount on the TIP, doing 1 bolt at a time, then rotating the engine 1/8th turn then bolt the next (8 bolts).

Of course, as you can figure, I didn't do it that way, and the nubs on the TIP fluid pump were not aligned properly to the Torque converter. The nubs snapped (unknowingly to me) and the shrapnel "could have" circulated throughout the TIP, so I just bit the bullet and got a used one.

All is fine now, and I'm preparing for a 3 day DE at Watkins Glen in a couple of weeks.

Makmov

That is typically how you do any automatic transmission. You can't, well you can, bolt the converter to the flywheel first, otherwise there are all kinds of problems that can occur as you found out.

That proceedure is pretty normal as far as slush boxes go on any car.

RicardoD

Thanks Lou, I have no plans to separate the trans from the engine during this project but I am glad this is captured in this thread for future reference.

RicardoD

Here is the 2 ft x 2ft square engine platform (0.6m x 0.6m). Its two pieces glued together to be about 2" thick. I used some 2x2 and 2x4 scraps and screwed that to the underside so that it fits snug on the ATV lift rails. Thanks you to other rennlisters for providing the basic size and tips to make a secure engine platform.

RicardoD

Success!! thank you to a special assist from fellow rennlister Stevepaa who was a patient mentor. It took about 6.5 hours total. I probably would have took me another day without Steve just to make a tool run and figure out the throttle cable pedal disconnect bit. Believe it or not Steve brought a crescent wrench which saved the day and also get me out of some tough spots that would have taken me much longer to resolve. He has dropped his engine and rebuilt it himself already which is pretty amazing.

Here's the deal. On the tiptronic simply follow the procedure in Adrian's book. There are some corrections I want to add which I will make in some follow on posts. Adrian's book has excellent illustrations for almost each step. Steve and I elected to remove the throttle cable from the pedal assembly.

The Stig

Awesome. Well done. I'll be tackling this shortly too.

RicardoD

When you get to the step in Adrian's book when you remove the fuse box cover you may actually get stuck if the plastic heads on the cover bolts fail. See this thread on the possible issues: Fuse Box Cover Removal

Once your done with that the Adrian's procedure states to remove the high voltage leads from the ignition coils. Its much easier to simply follow the leads coming off the coils and you will see they are the center leads on the distributor caps. Just pull the two center leads off the distributor caps instead. That way you avoid the headache of removing the black plastic coil caps, etc. You should purchase a good spark plug wire plier pullers to help do this.

The last bullet point in that step says "Detach harness connector from ignition final stage unit(s) D" You don't have to do this. Steve and I couldn't figure this out but you can skip this step. You will see it doesn't connect anything from the chassis to the engine preventing you from dropping it.

RicardoD

For the oil lines that Pelican wrench kit purchases (see first post in this thread) worked perfectly. That and a good pipe in case you need it for some more leverage.

On the sway bars remove the links first, then remove the anchor mounting bolts (Steve and I learned this the hard way).

There is step in Adrian's procedure which says "working at pedal cluster, disconnect throttle cable" This was an area I was completely unfamiliar with and will add photos below on how to do this. I totally understand why removing the throttle cable at the engine is easier in concept but I did it at the pedal cluster. When you lower the engine you can then pull it out through its metal tube in the center tunnel.