Some people say what they did in one sentence. I write a book.

So about that PS pump.

There's the stand-in, jacketed, bracketed, and waiting for its cozy to get hemmed so it can pivot when loosening its belt.  Don't get me wrong- I really wanted to grind that bastard down so I can move on with this mess and finally put this motor in.  Unfortunately, I was dropping things.  Constantly. 

That's generally my sign that it's time to stop and rest before I regret not doing it, so I decided to call it for the day.  I don't feel too bad, since I put in seven hours  (minus two smokes) of cutting and grinding after having been on the five hour metal quest. 

What really got me wasn't fatigue, though; it was the idler pulley bracket.  To sum it up, it won't fit this iteration of the 242's head.  Maybe it'll fit others, maybe it can fit this one and I'm an idiot, could also be both.  The important thing is that no amount of drilling, cutting, grinding, or cussing from me would get it to seat low and forward enough to share the top bolt hole with the PS pump front bracket/adjuster plate. 

After fighting with that bracket for a few hours, I said to hell with it and tried shoring things up with the pump's bracket, only to find that it needed even more grinding and cutting.  Then I said to hell with that, too.  Once I've finally finished with this bracket hell, I'll put up pictures of what cuts I made and all that mess so you can play along at home.

Before I started trying to club all this crap together, the pump assembly had been torn down for quite a while.  It's been even longer since doing eagle's pump, so my
 recollection of how all the components went together was dim and hazy.  When I got to the shop today, I took a second and looked over the pump assembly in eagle for reminders and to note any differences that may have occurred in the 7 years that passed between the two designs.

Here's the overall shot:

The first thing I noticed was the lack of the upper portion of the front pump bracket/plate/whatever (talked about this a few posts back), which I took as confirmation of that section being unnecessary. 

The next thing was disappointment that the idler pulley arrangement went unchanged, aside from a small spacer plate between the pulley arm and the bracket mounted to the block.  I've read that later Jeep 258 setups had this pulley repositioned to the passenger side, though I suspect that those would've been serpentine systems.  I'll have to look into it more- it would be nice to have something close to a straightforward alternative to coming up with a mounting design from scratch.

Lastly, the steering pump is single-pulley, not dual, like the Gremlin's.  I thought this was kind of strange, since they both have the same options and component placement.  The TSMs are in the wagon and the shop, so I can't check Gremlin's belt diagrams without getting up.  Until then, I suspect the Gremlin's dual pulley was put in place because the air pumps used during that period were placed right above the steering pump (I think the AMX here has one.  I may check when I get outside tomorrow). 

What do these pieces of info mean altogether?

Not much.  I'm going to go look at what to do about mounting this pulley.