Front Seal

When Lowell and I were working on his car several weeks ago, there was fresh oil on the front of the engine at the bottom.  After careful inspection it was determined that the front seal was leaking.  This is actually one of the few things to replace that is easy (relatively) to do on a Ferrari V-12 engine.

Lowell brought his car over so we could use the lift (this makes it a lot easier).  This was the first time he's had a lot of time to look at his car when it's on a lift.  Several items were noted and then it was onto replacing the front seal.

The first thing is to loosen and remove the alternator belt from the pulleys.  Lowell doesn't have A/C and the P/S pump is driven off a pulley on the left cam, so only the one belt needed to be removed.  Then you have to undo the tabbed washer that prevents the front pulley bolt from loosening.  This was pretty easy though you could only really see using a mirror since we didn't remove the radiator.  We did have to remove the shield that goes from the front of the body back under the radiator.

Next was a long bar, 1 7/16" (36mm) socket and a sledge to loosen the nut.  No room for an impact wrench with the radiator in place.  The problem here was keeping the engine from turning since the rear wheels were in the air.  After putting on the emergency brake with the car in fifth gear and using water pump pliers on the pulley shaft, the nut broke free.  The part that I thought would be the hardest was removing the pulley.  That just slid off after a single light tap of a hammer.

Then we pried out the old seal and tapped the new one in place.

After the pulley was back on, we tried to install the new tabbed washer.  However the inner diameter was too small.  The old washer was in pretty good shape so we just reused it.  We couldn't find a torque value for the nut so I just put it on pretty hard.  Lowell decided to check it and when he couldn't budge it, he decided that it was tight enough.  The last issue was getting the tabs of the washer put back on the nut.  There isn't enough room inside of the pulley for the tabs to lay flat and the process of using the socket to tighten the nut ends up pushing the ends of the tab against the pulley sides.  So it's a pain getting them pried up and pushed against the nut.  Again you are working using a mirror to see what you are doing.  Finally we got both sides done and re-tightened the alternator belt.

I recently replaced the front seal on my 330 GT.  It was pretty similar to how we did Lowell's except I had a better way to remove the large nut.  By putting a large screwdriver through the universal joint by the differential and letting it jam against the chassis, the crank is locked and can't move.

Here's the pulleys with the new seal ready to get the belts put back on.  You can see the large socket in the center.