Dipstick Removal

There are still a few trouble spots of hard-to-reach paint left to remove before the engine is ready for paint. One of those spots is around and behind the dip-stick tube which I planned to remove anyway to replace. Well that proved slightly more difficult that it should have been. Extremely difficult to remove. As in basically impossible.

The tube is just pressed into the block, typically Ford engines, at least modern ones have an O-ring and then simply connect to the engine with a bracket to hold them in. Well the V4 has no such bracket, and no O-ring. So it seems they just hammer them into the block, no amount of pulling could dislodge it. I tried tapping the top of the tube and using a spacer and a handful of hardware to try to press the tube out slowly ratcheting. All that did was tear the tapped section off the tube. At that point it was time for the big guns. I found a metal rod that was the right diameter to fit snugly in the tube and pounded it in from the oil pan side. I then drilled some holes in the tube for a plug weld.

I then welded the ever-loving crap out of it fusing the tube and the rod.

Let the whole thing cool and then pound on the rod from the bottom until the tube finally pops out. Push the rod the rest of the way out with a small punch. Here you can see the part of the tube that fits in the block below the weld. Nothing special about it other than the light scoring to hold it in place. This took an absurd amount of force for a dipstick tube. This picture is from the spare engine block I was using for testing the technique.

Now I need to find a replacement tube, it's just straight 5/16" ID tube/pipe which is a standard Ford size, so I will likely just buy a cheap Ford one and trim it to the right length.