The engine and transmission of all the FWD cars I've worked on was most easily removed by pulling them up out of the engine compartment. Some come out most easily as a unit. Others require they be separated in the car. It's been relatively straightforward to do. I have also changed the clutch on a few of them without removing them from the car. It was easy on the SAAB 99 and Austin Mini, a bit of a pain on the FIAT 128, and you have to remove the engine to get to it on the SAAB 96.
I think you're making a much bigger deal out of the job through unfamiliarity than it actually is. Disconnection from the front wheels has generally been quite easy. You don't have to take the suspension completely apart except in the rare instances of an atrocious design. It's often a matter of unbolting a suspension upright to allow some movement, slide the half-shafts off the transmission unit, and you're done. I haven't done much work on anything newer than 1980 because *all* cars got to be too much of a pain to work on to be worth my time, and because I stopped doing auto/motorcycle mechanics for a living in 1980 when I moved to California. That said, I've had the clutch replaced on both my Alfa Romeo Spider (front engine, rear drive) and Toyota MR2 (midengine drive unit lifted from a Corolla FWD car) within the past eight years. Discounting cost of parts (the Alfa was cheaper), the labor charged to do the jobs was identical. No other car I've owned since 1980 (about seven different ones) has ever required any service to the transmission or driveline components, and they've all cost roughly the same thing to service otherwise. G On Jul 25, 2006, at 8:38 AM, Gonz wrote: > Sure, but on FWD, you still cant do that easily, it has to come out > the > bottom, and on most of the ones I've seen, you have to still remove > alot > of stuff before you can do that. Again, its because the two half > shafts > are connected to the transaxle and the front wheels, which in turn is > connected to a bunch of suspension stuff. And the ones I've seen also > cant go down without taking some frame members off because the > transaxle > sticks out the side too much. I dont claim to have seen them all, and > as Godfrey points out, there are exceptions to both sides, but > generally > speaking most of the FWD drive trains have the same rough removal > procedure. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
