I've thoroughly enjoyed the thread so far guys,
One tip I can give you all is that when you have wheels & pulley's or anything made of alloy metals on steel shafts that is tight to take off is to enclose the area/item in a thick walled cardboard box and light up a 100 watt mains bulb in the enclosed box for eight or more hours so the gentle heat can expand all parts .
Then after switching off the lamp 8 or more hours later squirt in your free off stuff in the joint area and gently start wriggling the part you want to come off and tapping it with a block of wood . Don't use pullers or start braying with a hammer as though you want to kill it for that's what you'll surely do .
Don't use gas or oxy /acet torches to heat the alloy for your likely to melt it , gentle heat dissipated through out is what does the trick almost every time . It's how we used to put steel gudgeon pins in or pull them out ..those pins join the crankshaft connecting rod to the engines pistons in days of yore before circlips became the norm.
The bigger the item your working with the longer the heating period required , remember aluminium & zinc alloy coefficients of linear expansion are greater than steel so you in effect expand the joint apart .
Sometimes for big casings like cast iron or alloy gear boxes we used live steam to heat wooden or steel box enclosure for four or five hours . Occasionally you can boil up a part in clean plain water in a steel drum/bucket out on the BBQ if you have big side burners . The use your freeing oils etc. after you have pulled the hot part out of the water .
I wouldn't recommend using the oven in the kitchen as the heat source as most of the time it will be either be too cold or too hot and dry as well as stinking out the homestead and like as not causing a fire .
The tip of taking pictures is good , in this digital age we can take 10,000 pics for almost nothing . It is also worth while to take several pictures of an item from different angles before , during and after and as you take them apart then scribble a greasy picture number referenced note in pencil on a pad of stapled up scrap paper as to what each shot actually is and what your trying to concentrate upon. Pencils write on greasy paper fairly well .
There is nothing more amusing than trying to find a home for the last piece in the Ziploc bag after eight months of rest time once you have almost fully assembled the item from 67 other bits , only to find that you never realized you hadn't got a picture of it and which would have been part No five in your photographic sequences as you took things apart . Guess how I know?
This is especially important with screws which are same thread & diameter but of different lengths .
You can also use a cardboard box side with a drawing plan and make holes where each bolt came out of then slip the bolt in the nominated hole . In my time I've often come across casings where the bolt has popped through because it was not the correct bolt for the hole ..made me wonder where the shorter bold was and what problem that had cause by being in the wrong hole . I've also had numerous occasions cases where I have had to depth gauge each blind hole to find the correct bolt length for the cast iron & alloy casings because someone dumped all of the removed couple of hundred nuts , bolts & washers in a bag & I've had to finish their job many weeks /months later or asi n one case about 18 years later.
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