Now stripping down my engine and have got the fan shroud off. It comes in 2 halves, back and front and I've removed all the nuts and screws. The only thing holding it together is the dipstick tube which runs through both sides. I've tried gentle tapping but it's not moving. You can see the tube on the right hand side of this picture. Any ideas?
Wack it harder. There’s a couple of ‘dowls’ iirc holding it together. Just put mine in storage so can’t show you I’m afraid.
Thanks for the advice. I got it to open up a couple of mm, so it's probably going in the right direction but I'm afraid of breaking the casing. It's a lot lighter than I was expecting. It's a steel tube but it almost looks like it's been fused to the aluminium casing. It would be interesting to get it moving because my dipstick has always seemed to read incorrectly.
The tube is fixed to the outside part. As Razzy says there are some locating dowels but once free of those you should be able to twist a bit. It's corrosion around the tube.
I can see where the dowel should be from the parts manual (page 9.00) though I don't seem to have one. Only one is shown at top right. All the screws are gone and I've got a gap opening up, but I'm finished for today. Tomorrow. Thanks everybody.
I got it apart now thanks to help from the above. For future reference there are two dowels which show in the picture attached. You can see in the original picture there are some marks in the metal of the outer section which correspond with where the dowels are located. Once the halves are prised apart at the dowels, the dipstick tube pulls out of the back section.
