Here’s the deal: I lost the bet.
When we bought these motor homes, the plan was to make our money back within a year. That didn’t happen. It’s been well over a year since we dragged them onto the property, and my wife has been more than patient. She wants this thing gone, and honestly, I don’t blame her. A bet’s a bet.
If you caught our first motor home teardown, you know how that went. It took several days of hard, sweaty, hand-tool work to get it apart. This time I showed up with better tools: the dump trailer and the backhoe. The goal was to make short work of it, strip the body off, and pull the 454 out, which would be a whole lot easier without a house built around it.
Rip and Tear
I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure how it would go. Seven minutes in, I’d knocked out about 8 or 10 feet of this 27- or 37-footer (I lose track), and it became obvious this was going to go well. So I grabbed the GoPro, set up a timelapse, and let the backhoe do what backhoes do.
By the end of the first day we had it basically torn apart in about 30 minutes. Not completely, but close. The next morning I hauled off a load and started filling the trailer again. It makes an unbelievable mess, but compared to the last one, this felt like cheating. If you’ve got property and you’re on the fence about a backhoe, this is your sign.
Quick plug for a local sponsor, DPV Rentals. If you’re in the Cheney or West Plains area and need a dump trailer, we’ve got one for rent. (It’s us. We’re the sponsor.)
Getting the 454 Out
With most of the mess cleaned up, a few jobs were left: raking, a small trash pile, and some tanks I’m hoping to sell. The priority was getting the engine out, though. Rain was in the forecast, and with the body gone, that motor was just sitting there unprotected.
The list was pretty simple:
- Unhook the driveshaft
- Pull the one bolt under the transmission so everything can lift straight up
- Deal with the exhaust and motor mounts
- Figure out the wiring harness
The harness was a judgment call. This 454 is fuel-injected, so if I could find the computer, it’d be worth saving. I wasn’t going to burn the whole day hunting for it, though. Standalone harnesses exist. Some parts came off with a breaker bar, and some just got ripped out, since they were already disconnected anyway.
Then I hooked a chain to it (the hooks were already on there, which was a nice little gift), fired up the backhoe, moved my tools out of the yard-sale zone, and pulled.
Of course, one fuel line was still hanging on. After that got sorted, the 454 came out clean.
“Don’t ever let anybody entice you with a free or cheap motor home for the engine. It’s a never-ending saga.”
I stand by that. But we got it.
What’s Next
In a future episode we’ll tear this engine down and figure out what’s wrong with it. The plan is a mild rebuild. With the low miles, hopefully it just needs rings. It definitely needs head gaskets, and I want to put a cam in it while we’re in there.
The 4L80 transmission is coming along for the ride too. It only has forward gears, so something’s wrong with the reverse band. It might be seized, or it might just be a blown seal. The fluid smelled terrible, so it’s getting a full going-through. We’re going to learn how to rebuild a 4L80 together.
Wheel it, Wreck it, Wrench it, Repeat!
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