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July 9, 2003
1.5 hours

Pedal Assembly Removal

There are only two items still attached to the body that need to be removed: the brake and clutch pedals and the gas tank. I planned on removing both this evening, but as usual, sometimes things don't go exactly the way we plan. But the gas tank will come out tomorrow in preparation for body removal.

The first thing I needed to do was get the tank drained. Like an idiot, I filled it up the one time I drove it (you'll recall that it overheated). So there are about 20 gallons of fresh gas in the tank (well, year-old gas, anyway). I drained it into my 10-quart oil drain pan and dumped a few loads into the Protege5. I doubt that the old gas will affect it. I also filled up our lawnmower, power washer and the 5-gallon can of spare fuel and the 2-gallon can of oil/fuel mix for the weed whacker and the leaf blower.

Initially, I was draining the fuel using the fuel line, which was slow going. But then I climbed under there to see if I could disconnect it at the tank for faster results, and I discovered that I shouldn't ever underestimate those Buick engineers. There is a conveniently-located drain plug for the gas tank (which is in really nice shape, by the way). So I put my pan underneath, tipped the car back so fuel wouldn't come splashing out all over the place, and removed the plug. Then I carefully lowered the front of the car until the gas started to flow. I kept an eye on it as it drained so that I wouldn't have an overflow problem. To stop the flow, I just pumped up the front of the car again and pulled the pan out. A job I was dreading turned into a piece of cake.

While I was waiting for the fuel to drain, I tackled the brake and clutch pedal assemblies that were still attached to the frame. While I could probably remove the body with these still attached, I figured that one less obstacle in the project would be a good thing, so off they came. There was really nothing difficult about the procedure, but I made sure to take a lot of photos to ensure that I put it all back together properly. The brake pedal came off without a fight, but the clutch took some wrestling and contorsions on my part to get to all the bolts holding the bracket in place once I located them under the crud on the frame.

Close-up of brake pedal assembly shows how the linkage attaches
to the master cylinder via that long rod. It also shows how much
crud has built up in the area.

Here's the clutch linkage on the other side of the
frame rail. Again simple and easy to understand.
The spring in the lower left helps pull the pedal up
after you release it, and the linkage that connects
it to the pedal assembly is symmetrical, so it is easy
to install.

Here's the entire assembly removed from the car and reassembled
on the bench so I can document how it goes together. Each end is
secured to the central pivot shaft by a washer and a spring clip.
Anyone have any idea what the round washer-like thing is in the
upper left corner? It just appeared on my bench a few weeks ago.
I'm guessing that it is either a insulator for the radiator or part
of the transmission. It may also be a spring insulator. I didn't remove
it, someone else must have, so I have no idea. It is a steel cup in the
center with a rubber washer around its circumference. Any ideas?

And speaking of crud, this particular area of the chassis is the worst I've found yet as far as crud build-up. It was deep enough to swallow half of a deep-well socket in some places. So I scraped and scraped and scraped looking for all the fasteners, eventually finding them all by using the "is it coming off yet?" method (find a bolt, remove it, see if the part you're trying to remove is loose--if not, there are probably more bolts). The good thing about all this crud is that it seems to be a mixture of mud and grease or oil, which has perfectly preserved the metal frame and all the fasteners. None of them were difficult to remove, their threads were clean and rust-free, and whenever I scraped down to bare metal, it was clean and shiny as the day it was made. Nice.

Here's some of the crud that fell off as I was removing the
pedals. That is without a lot of dedicated scraping. Cleaning
up the frame is going to be a very messy job...

The gas tank will come out tomorrow night (if all goes according to plan), and then I'll pull the doors off. I'm going to fabricate some door frame braces to help keep the body fixed in position after it has been removed from the frame. I'm not too keen on welding them, so we'll see what I come up with instead.

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E-mail me at toolman8@sbcglobal.net

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Last modified on 02/06/2005

Thanks, Fidget!