The crank pulley has to come off. You could remove the starter motor and wedge the ring gear to stop it turning over ,or I find a good way to do it is use a socket on a solid drive breaker bar and with the hand brake on and the wheels chocked give the bar a sharp hit with a hammer in the right direction and this will usually loosen the nut without turning over the engine. Same in other direction when doing final tighten. The main thing is a sharp hit not a particularly heavy one. Best of luck. Just make sure you have everything aligned as in instructions and you should have no problems.

 

He's got an automatic. Air impact if you have acess to one is your best bet.

 

ended up getting it off with my impact, had to turn it to 140psi to get it to budge.. car is running again.

 

I know this solution is to late but can help someone else in the future without a impact wrech.

Use a 1/2 inch drive breaker with the appropiate socket (I think it is 20mm), take and tie the breaker bar to the lower control arm, disconnect the coil wires or remove spark plug wires so engine can NOT start and crank the engine over using the starter. Bolt should break loose without a problem. Worked for me this weekend.

 

Use a 1/2 inch drive breaker with the appropiate socket (I think it is 20mm), take and tie the breaker bar to the lower control arm, disconnect the coil wires or remove spark plug wires so engine can NOT start and crank the engine over using the starter. Bolt should break loose without a problem. Worked for me this weekend.

This sounds like a really ingenious idea and I'd like to try it when I do my timing belt in 20k miles or so, but I was wondering...

Unless I'm misunderstanding, this method is using the starter as a battery-operated impact wrench (loosely speaking). As this is not the intended use for the starter, is there any chance this could damage it? It seems to me that this procedure might put an abnormal load on the starter.

Confirm or deny?

 

Not really as it just used as an interminit kick, same as kicking the engine over to bring a certain piston to TDC.