1. Break the lug nuts loose on the right front wheel, because it's going to have to come off.
2. Jack the front of the car up at so you have at least 8 inches or so between the tires and the floor. Support the car well with jackstands, because you're going to be cranking around on stuff pretty good later on. I prefer putting the jackstands right under the main sway bar bushing brackets. The weight is all being held by the frame of the car, and most jack stands are cupped perfectly to fit around those bushing brackets. Having the jack stands there holds the car steadier than putting them on the "jack points" of the floor pan, imo.
3. Remove the right front wheel.
4. Remove the TB from the intake, so the intake can move around. You don't have to take the whole intake off.
5. Remove the battery and battery tray.
EDIT. Remove the coolant overflow bottle and line. (the neck is in the way when you have to raise the engine). You can also wait to remove this unitl you have the engine free and can lower it. It comes out easier that way.
6. Take the fuse box loose. It won't be able to move as a whole very much because of the wiring harness, but it will move enough. The plastic locating pin that goes into the fender is the hardest part because it is stiff, but it will just pop out, especially if you can get something thin in there to help pry.
7. Remove the splash shield from the right front wheel well, and remove the pencil strut (that vertical bracket between the frame and lower torque strut)
8. Remove the exhaust header bracket and heat shield. Remove the 4 nuts on the exhaust header flange. You don't have to take the exhaust completely loose, just taking the nuts off allows it to slide on the studs and lets the engine move enough for later. Trust me, you need to move the engine A LOT.
9. Remove the the upper motor mount, then the lower motor mount. The engine's not going anywhere, because there's still a big old bolt holding it to the frame.
10. Now you need to put a floor jack under the oil pan with some blocks on it. The blocks do two things: allow you to jack it up high enough, and protect the metal. This is a picture once the engine is completely free (and pretty high actually)...as you can see, the top tilts backwards alot. This picture shows about as far back as you should let it go. As you're jacking, simply make sure you're forcing the jack under the car farther...this keep the engine centered on it as it goes up.

11. Get just a smudge of pressure on the jack. Then remove the plastic plug in the wheel well and insert a Torx T-55 bit into that bolt that you might not have ever known was there.
12. The next big goal is removing the engine mount plate. (The thing with the blue x on it)

To do this, you'll need to remove the power steering pump. There are four bolts, three that you reach through the pulley, and a fourth on the other side that goes in the slot of the bracket for the pump.


NOW, you need to remove the three long bolts holding the plate to the engine. Argh.

Once you weasel those bolts out, the mount plate should come free with a little coaxing. It's sits into a recessed part of the timing cover, so you have to pull on it a bit.

You should be looking like this ^^
13. Now. If you (like us) decided to not take your crankshaft pulley off, this gets a little interesting. If you did take your pulley off (which I would recommend doing if you have the proper puller available. It just makes everything easier) then you're good to go. Smply remove the outer timing cover.
If your crank pulley is still on, then you have to find a way to get the outer timing belt cover out of the way enough to access the cam gear. Problem is, it's not extremely flexible, so you can't simply bend it out of the way enough without breaking it. Here's what we did, and what happened:
-Loosen the two screws at the bottom of the timing cover, they're kind of tucked behind the pulley.

Once those screws are loose you can unsnap the cover from the rear cover, but it's still in the way. We tryed to trim the cover in a fashion similiar to the mod for being able to use an adjustable cam gear, shown below

Problem #1.....that's hard to do when the cover is still on the car. We ended up breaking the cover, and it looked like this...broken at the circled points.

Not the end of the world at all, because the important bottom half of the outer cover was still very intact. But, if we had been doing this in warmer weather, we might have found a way to successfully get the cover out of the way without breaking it. Don't forget to tighten those screws on the bottom of the cover back up.
So, the cover is out of the way. Just not quite the way we planned. Next step!
14. Take a marker and mark the timing belt on the tooth that sits next to the timing mark. Turn the engine (using the crank pulley bolt) to line up the notch in the cam gear with the notch in the timing cover.
15. Stick an allen wrench in the hole designed for an allen wrench in the timing belt tensionor, and then loosen the bolt on the tensioner. Note what position the tensioner is in, so you can put it back in the same spot when you tighten it back up.
16. Loosen the cam gear bolt. DO THIS BEFORE YOU TAKE THE BELT OFF. The belt helps hold it in place, it's already tricky enough to get that bolt broke loose, don't make it any harder.
NOTE!!! This is the point where we dropped the engine off the jack. OOPS!! We had gotten carried away with trying to get the timing cover off, and when we whacked the breaker bar with a hammer to loosen the cam bolt, the whole engine moved enough to fall off the block. Very avoidable if you simply check to make sure the engine is still sitting squarely on the block and you have someone hold onto the intake manifold or something to steady it while you whack with the hammer.
17. Put the gear back at TDC, cause it probably moved while you were banging on it to get the bolt loose. Now slide the belt off the cam gear, without moving the gear away from TDC. If it moves a little it's ok, cause you've marked the belt, so you know which tooth goes where.
18. Lower the engine to close to original position and remove the coil pack, plug wires and valve cover. It's much easier to get the VC off if you also remove the fuel rail cover and unplug the harness from the injectors.
19. Remove the rocker arm bolts, and lift the rocker arms out of the car. Set them in their original orientation on a towel or something, so you don't get the shaft's flipped upside down when reinstalling them.
20. Remove the bracket that holds the hoses and harnesses there on the drivers side of the head.
21. Remove the cam position sensor, circled in red.

You can see we also removed the coolant lines running to and from the heater core and stuffed some rags in them. They seemed like they were going to be in the way, so we went ahead and just pulled them. A moderate amount of coolant with disperse if you do so. Have rags. It does make it quite a bit easier to move those heater lines when they're not hooked up...and as you can see from the picture, they're in the way pretty bad and you will have to pull on them pretty hard to get them out of the way when sliding the cam in and out.
22. Wiggle the cam gear off the cam.
23. Lower the engine as low as you can.
24. Slide the cam out of the drivers side of the head. It takes two hands on the cam to get it out, and you also need someone to pull the heater lines out of the way, and lift the fuse box up and towards the headlight. This will let you barely slip the cam under and behind the fuse box enough to clear the head, and then you're out.
25. Take the positioning magnet out of the old cam and put it in the new one. It's a Torx head screw holding it in, I forget which size.
26.Lube the new cam up real good. Engine oil works, I prefer actual engine pre-lube. Much thicker and stickier, more protection.

27. Slide the new cam in carefully, while someone is again holding the heater lines and fuse box out of the way. There is no way to replace the main cam seal at this point, without removing a bunch more stuff and taking the inner timing cover off. Your old cam seal should be fine. If you're doing a high mileage engine, you should make this a big project and replace the water pump and cam seal. In this picture (my car) you can see the cam seal...obviously not accessible unless the inner timing cover is off.

28. Reinstall stuff. Make sure you use a torque wrench on the rocker arm bolts and torque them to 25 ft/lbs. I think it might technically be only 23, but 25 floats my boat better.
29. When reinstalling the cam gear bolt, the only way I know how to do it without any special tools is to use a long hefty screwdriver to pry against the gear the opposite way that you are tightening it.
30. Everything else should be pretty straightforward, hardest part is getting those 3 long bolts that hold the engine mount plate back on. Once you get the mount plate back on, reinstall the big T-55 through bolt, so the engine is secure once more.
I dunno what else to say...I'm sure I forgot a couple little things. When I reread a week from now I'll probably remember.
Hopefully this is helpful to someone!! Good luck, and let's all make more horsepower!!




