Motor is in, tranny is bolted up, IM is on, most of the vac lines are run!
Here we go!
So after this morning's fiasco where I had to rip apart the engine again to dry off the backside of my bearings, the engine is ready to go in once more. Here she is with the crank pulley on, just itching to get slung on my rope hoist to go into the engine.
Then I got to thinking. I had some coffee this morning to jumpstart the old brain pan and decided to work a little smarter and not as hard. I measured the widest part of the motor, there at the bellhousing, and it was 14 inches across.
Hmm.
I measured how much clearance I had between the subframe and my garage floor. I had about 22.5 inches.
Double hmm.
I picked up the engine and the stand without rupturing anything.
One more hmm for good measure and I thought I was on to something.
Get on the floor bitch!!!
Slid her on the carpet underneath the subframe and stood her up in the engine bay. I got this idea from you, Carl!
I thought about using my hoist to get it on to the mounts but that was too much trouble. I just lowered the car down to meet the engine, much easier. And since I didn't have any help, I used the employees that I had either bred or indentured. I held the motor up while my wife and daughter spun the bolts on to the mounts.
There it sits. Standing all by itself. Makes....sniff...me real proud (chokes back tears)...standing all by herself again!
Mindy was really proud of herself. She's more gangster than all of East St. Louis.
I was able to rope my daughter into staying in the garage to help me out. She did one helluva job! I put her to work removing the TB from the intake mani. *
***Note to Steve about the IM. You have to do some fiddling to get it to fit. I'll show you what I mean in a second.
You can't bolt the whole thing up to the injector plate and then drop it in. Everything has to go on separately, you even have to take off the TB, fuel rail and injectors to get the mani into place. Kind of a pain in the ass. If the runners were .5 inches shorter, there would be no problems at all.
Here's my daughter putting the TB back on from the top while I'm underneath the car tightening the mani down.
Much easier to do this on the new IM versus the stock IM. You can actually see the back of the engine.
Now I mentioned massaging some stuff to get things to fit. Brake booster line will have to be trimmed, but I figured that. I had to remove one of the ABS hard lines and bend it a bit in a few places to get the throttle bracket to fit though. You also have to bend the PS and AC lines a little in order to clear the throttle itself. Again, a little bit shorter runners would have alleviated this, but it's not that big of a deal. Although I don't have a pic of it, I'm going to have to run a new heater hose as well so that it's not right up against the IM.
Here's the ABS line you have to muck with. I had to pop it off and bend it a bit to get enough clearance.
Oh and I had to see what this will look like. I can't fucking wait to install it this fall!
Back in the box with you.....
Here we are bolting up the FW and clutch.
And we moved to the transmission. With my daughter helping, we got that sucker in and bolted up in like 15 minutes! Surprised the crap out of me. Usually I fight that beast for like an hour trying to get the input shaft lined up. Went in slicker than snot this time around!
Now the money shots.
Mostly done for the day at this point. We wrenched for a good five hours after I re-assembled the motor this morning. I'll probably go back out and start routing the wiring harness later on tonight.
Look! She's got hands like her dad!
