First thing then. I mentioned a while back that the documents talk about a cross member that needed to be removed, but I couldn't figure out why. Well, now I know!! It took about five minutes of moving to realise the engine was not going to get past that particular lump of metal. It didn't last long with the angle grinder, at least to a point where the engine did fit. I need to tidy the ends up and cap them off, but that's an easy task.
A few photos to start then. This is the engine mid-flight, with the offending bar still in place;
Once that was out the way the engine went into place quite easily;
Unfortunately I forgot to take a wide shot, but then again I was doing this for positioning rather than pictures.
On that subject, there is a fair bit of space available. One comment was that the steering column needed a notch cut out of the inlet manifold support. Not for me though, I think it's because I had moved the steering column to give me the 10 degree angle;
Although I wasn't sure why the steering column was resting against the chassis vertical. It could be because it wasn't bolted tight, but even if it shifts when tightened up I still have a bit of space available.
The tightest area was the transmission tunnel. With the engine mounted as far back as possible, I had this left;
It does appear slightly off centre here but that's because of the lower bracket. And on the subject of the lower bracket;
This is the offending part, this is stopping the shift and the prop from being in the centre. But it's also a fantastic place for the front gearbox support. Once that plate has been removed, I have two chunky bolts going into pretapped holes, all just begging for a custom bracket leading to a rubber mount. This is similar to how the Saturn plans describe it, but theirs is a hard bracket and I'm not happy with that.
All in all a really good day. I'm not going to put much else into this post as I need to separate out the information. Time to get on to those then.
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