Wow, it's been two years since I updated this thread
I finally got around to doing the timing cover earlier this year - I was going to be home for a week or two with a spare car, so a perfect opportunity.
It ended up taking me about a week. Everything was going smoothly, even got the crankshaft nut off without too much drama. My rattlegun has been on its last legs for a long time, so I took the opportunity to retire it and bought a new stubby but reasonably high torque model. It
just fit in the gap between the engine and A/C condenser, and ugga-dugga-ed the nut off without too much fuss.
Next job - pop the balancer off. I remember asking here if the description in the manual was realistic - it turns out no, it wasn't
There's not much room to swing a hammer at the nose of the shaft while the engine is still in situ, but I gave it a go. Then I swapped the hammer for the heaviest lump of steel I could find, but I was buggered after a couple of swings.
So I came up with this brilliant idea, a brass hammer tool for my air chisel.
... which turned out to be useless, brass is not strong enough to dislodge the crankshaft pulley off the cone

That was an hour or two wasted, but at least I'd had a chance to catch my breath again
After running out of ideas, I asked my BIL what I was doing wrong, (he'd done the timing cover in his GQ previously) - his advice was something like "you just have to hit it harder" :/
So day 3 of trying to get the damn pulley off, I moved the A/C condenser out of the way (hung it from the bonnet latch), dropped the winch out, and drilled a ~30mm hole through the bullbar behind the number plate, in line with the crankshaft. I then inserted a 1" solid bar through the hole, and belted the hell out of it with my big lump of steel. A couple of swings later, it finally popped off the cone.
I should probably add that I wasn't hitting the crankshaft nose directly, I'd made up a little mandrel to slip over the nose and protect the threads from damage. It looks a little secondhand now though, with a crack through the top plate from all the thumping.
Everything went smoothly from there (IIRC).
The water pump didn't look too bad (but was replaced anyway)
I was replacing all the usual studs, but was surprised to see the one behind the water pump looked pretty new. I really don't think the timing cover had been off in the last 20 years though...
The o rings on the timing cover looked like they may have been leaking
just a little bit - but I would have been pretty annoyed to get this far to then find they were fine...
They'd certainly seen better days...
Re-assembly was much quicker, and amazingly I haven't had any coolant weeping out since
