Open Heart Surgery

When the vessels to your heart become clogged with atherosclerotic plaque and you start having chest pain at rest, there are generally 3 options:

1. Take a medication like aspirin to make your blood less "clotty" (or "coagulopathic" as fancy people like to say)
2. Thread a catheter into the obstructed vessel and place a stent or inflate a balloon to restore blood flow to the heart
3. Go for open heart "bypass" surgery.

Granted, the above is a gross simplification of how heart disease is managed, but for the purposes of this analogy the aforementioned should suffice.  Generally speaking, bypass surgery is reserved for severe and diffuse heart disease that cannot be easily fixed with a catheter procedure.  This sort of disease usually develops after decades of neglect and poor diet.  Sadly, this is the state my truck is currently in...he's a 58 year old man (which is like 108 in vehicle years) who hasn't seen a doctor in decades and is on the verge of flat-lining.  The only way to bring this old soul back to health is to cut open his chest and get right down to where the problem lies.  So last weekend I did just that...I disassembled the front end to get a better look at my truck's disease.

 

To say I was a bit nervous would be an understatement...but removing the front end turned out to be relatively painless (granted, it takes a lot longer when you don't have air-tools).  I was extremely careful to photograph every component of the dissassembly to ensure that when the time comes (which may end up being like 5 years from now) that I am actually able to put it all back together correctly.  Below is an example of one of the photos I took to help with the re-assembly:

This photo (along with a few others) have been saved to my hard drive under a folder name entitled "hood assembly."  I have been told (and read) that although things may look completely obvious as you are disassembling, that once a few months or years pass, it often becomes very difficult to determine what goes where.  My hope is that these photos (along with my Master Parts Catalog) will save me headaches down the road.  Additionally, I stored the nuts and bolts for each respective part in a unique zip-lock storage that is labeled accordingly:

Granted, I will probably replace many of the nuts and bolts, but this will ensure that at the very least i have all the parts I need to get my humpty-dumpty back together again.  I also plan to organize all the zip lock bags by section of the truck (i.e. all the zip locks from the front end of the truck will be stored in a box labled "front end.")  I know, I know...there are probably people out there reading this thinking "Nerd alert!  This guy is a total dork!"  But come folks, I've never done this before so ya gotta forgive me for geeking out a bit.

I also feel compelled to acknowledge my mentor and neighbor, Jim.  Jim is a genius when it comes to cars and anything mechanical.  At some point, I will author an entire post on Jim...he definitely deserves it.  Without him, I probably would have spent last weekend just staring at my truck, knees trembling in fear.   Truth be told, the romance of restoring a car is far less intimidating than actually busting out your socket wrench and doing it.  Jim was right by my side for the entire take-down of the front end and taught me a ton along the way.  Without him, I might still be trying to figure out how to pop the hood!  Here's a photo the carnage from our day's work:

The nice thing about working on a truck (as opposed to a living human being) is that trucks don't die when you leave the operating room with their chest still open.  Next step...pull that engine!