The E4OD was still three years away in 1986. No… not the 7.3 IDI and transmission, because I’d probably not be writing this so flippantly if so. I wrote “ IDIot Stopper” on the piece of angle iron, but some damn good it was for stopping this idiot. Sliding outwards from under the front of the frame rails, I realize I had positioned myself right under the 1,400 pound combined weight of a fully built 7.3 liter International Harvester diesel engine mated and the E4OD transmission, all hanging from the farthest reach of a Harbor Freight folding engine crane with a piece of two-inch angle iron stuffed into the hydraulic ram to keep it from sagging. I decide a frontal exit is the best course of action, and so drag myself through the still-shiny remnants of an oil drain pan mishap from when I removed the wheezing 460 Big Block this van was saddled with 36 years ago from the factory in Lorain, Ohio. Maybe I need to cross reference my 19 Ford E-350s and see where the frame holes are on those. Those holes are missing.” I say to myself, with furrowed brow, pointing my headlamp at the location this crossmember should have bolted right into. The humidity has combined with decade-old oil leaks, and plastered my black T-shirt (for I have learned that all shirts I own will eventually become black, so let’s just get it over with) in a quasi-organic tarry concoction that stains wherever it lands, to the point where only removing the first layer of skin would get it off. I am rolling around under a 1986 Ford E-350, dragging a dirt and oil-encrusted transmission crossmember with me. Around me, the sound of cicadas fills the trees of the temperate forest that surround the house - a sharp melodic overtone to the drone of I-85 barely a half mile away. The sporadic afternoon thundershowers typical of midsummer weather in the South had given way to a humid miasma.
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