I have a crack next to my heater hose inlet on my '97 4.3L. I have managed to get the upper intake off (Haynes absolutely no help on this engine), and am almost ready to pull the lower off. However, I have one bolt it seems just underneath my A/C bracket. I found some instructions on the Autozone web site that says loosen the bracket bolts, but do not pull the A/C bracket off. But it doesn't mention pulling the steering pump pulley off to get to the four bolts behind. As far as I can tell it looks necessary to do so. But I don't have a puller with me. Has anyone here ever done this job and can give me some insight? I appreciate your help...

J.R.

Turns out those bolts behind the steering pump pulley are just to hold the pump in place to the compressor bracket. Once I had the other bolts loose I was just able to get a socket over the manifold bolt under the compressor bracket. What a learning experience this was, took me over 2 days because of my stupidity. Didn't mark the distributor rotor, etc, when I pulled it out (I took the book line by line literally) and caused another half day of needless labor. I had forgotten about there being TDC on both strokes of piston 1, and ended up trying to insert the distributor on the wrong stroke, and of course the engine will not start due to it being way out of time. After the fourth or fifth try it just happened to be positioned at the "right" TDC and it worked. Oh well....