Well, if you read this thread, you know about the problems we've been having with my father-in-law's Stratus. Quick review: Head gasket blown? No, cracked head. Poo. Buy and install rebuilt head. Runs, but bad. Cracked block. Poo.

There, now you are up to speed.

Well, thanks to good old eBay, my father-in-law found a crate engine from a '98 Stratus with the 2.4L DOHC for $600. Apparently a guy bought it for his car and never got around to using it. I'd say it was 6-12 months old...just sitting around. We got it in, blew all of the dirt dobber nests out of the vacuum lines and removed the rusted in spark plugs and we were ready to do an engine swap!!!

Well, we roll the car in and here I am assessing the damage...

 

A couple of more disassembly pics...

 

Dropping the motor.

We have the engine supported on floor jacks while we lift the car with the engine hoist. This presented a problem later in the project...

 

Here's the start of our problem.

1) The engine hoist is at the top of its limit.
2) We still have to lift 6-8 inches.
3) The engine is now resting on the legs of the hoist.
4) My good floor jack is trapped inside the legs of the hoist and the other floor jack is crap...

What to do...what to do...

 

Pic of the motor...along with the crappy floor jack which was WORTHLESS in this project. Whew...I'm glad that's off my chest.

 

Solution...we built an A-Frame around the car with 4x4's and lifted the car the rest of the way with a come-a-long. This did 2 things for us. It lifted the car the rest of the way that the hoist couldn't do and it allowed us to release the hoist from the car so we could use the legs of the hoist to roll the engine out. That actually worked really well...too bad we didn't think of it earlier.

 

Got it out...

 

Where'd it go?

 

Separating the tranny from the bad engine...

 

...and put it on the new engine...