September 2007

This is a picture of the fitted horns.

This is a picture of the fitted washer wiper bottle. For this, I had to drill holes into the drivers foot box and secure with rivets. A bit of confusion here as on the Rover engine, the bottle bracket should be already come fitted, but on mine it wasn't. Also, the Ford bottle is on the left hand side, and on the Rover the connection for it is on the right hand side. I'm not overly happy with the placement of the wire connection to the bottle here, but this is where the wires to the bottle exit the wiring loom so I don't think I have much choice. I'll ask BlatChat.

This shows the two J-hoses connected to the thermostat housing on the engine. Rubber lubricant is required to ease the hoses into place and clamps tightened to secure the hoses.

This shows the two J-hoses connected to the thermostat housing on the engine. It also shows the radiator hose attached to the end of the smaller J-Hose. Any excess can be trimmed at a later stage. Rubber lubricant is required to ease the hoses into place and clamps tightened to secure the hoses.

Other than that, the rest of the time was spent torquing the front suspension up. All done, apart from the left hand side brake hose, as by this time it was pub time. Also, there is some final tightening to be done when the car is completed and loaded to ensure that the rubber bushes are correctly pre loaded.

The next job is to get the gearbox fitted to the engine, and to get the engine and gearbox into the car. A neighbour is lending me an engine hoist and all being well, I'll attempt this task next weekend....

I say "all being well" because I'm working in a standard sized flat roofed garage. The engine and gearbox have to go in at a 30-40 degree angle and I'm wondering if the garage will be high enough. If not, I can lower the front of the car, and raise the rear giving more access. Alternatively, if this doesn't work I'm guessing I could get the car to the rolling chassis stage so that I'm able to wheel the car outside the garage. I'm reluctant to do this though because this deviates from the build manual. I'll have to wait until I see the engine hoist to make my mind up.

This shows the engine bay protected by card, along with the engine hoist. It also shows that my garage has a small rounded 'step' that is shorter at one end then the other (because my garage is on a slope). This caused a bit of a problem as it meant that the engine hoist had to be manhandled over the step.

Engine and gearbox finally assembled.

Before fitting the engine, the exhaust manifold and starter motor have to be fitted.

Starter motor attached to engine with two leads (brown lead from the alternator and red lead from the battery positive terminal) together with the brown/red wire that exists the engine loom.

Exhaust manifold attached to engine with 5 bolts.

Engine attached to engine hoist, and part way in (with help from the "engine management team" consisting of Claire and my Dad). The trick here was to try and get the clamp as close to the engine as possible. This probited some movement in the chain attached to the engine, making the engine more stable. It was also required due to space requirements as the garage I'm working in is a standard sized flat roofed garage. We attempted a 'dry run' of getting the engine in over the car, but the top of the engine hoist was too close to the garage door, so we dropped the front of the car to the lowest setting on the axle stands which then gave the engine hoist enough clearence.

Dropping the axle stands also helped with the angle that the engine had to enter the car. The build manual mentions that the engine should go in at a 30-40 degree angle, so lowering the front of the car meant that the front of the engine didn't have to be as high.

We actually had a bit of scare at this point, because the engine hoist clamp broke and the engine dropped around 4 inches whilst over the car! Fortunatley, it didn't drop any further and the engine didn't touch the car, but we hurredly got the hoist back away from the car and lowered the engine to the ground. To fix the problem, ropes and the original webbing were used to hold the engine securely in place and this worked as a replacement to the broken clamp. Not ideal though.

A rope was attached to the gearbox tail housing which if kept tort helped to keep the engine from swivelling (this was Claire's job). The build manual said to attach the manifold and engine mounting brackets prior to getting the engine in the car. However, this wasn't possible as the right hand bracket and the manifold were both fouling a chassis tube, so these had to come off and be reattached once the engine was lowered a bit further and the items cleared the chassis tubes.

Additionally, prior to getting the engine fully in place, the propshaft had to be located into the rear of the gearbox tail housing.

As can be seen, the engine is actually in and the kit is beginning to look a bit more like a car than a bath tub, which is good. The ropes and webbing are still attached because the mounting bolts haven't been torqued yet and I may need to lift the engine a touch to help move it properly into place to torque some of the bolts up.

In summary, all in all, a good day and I got done what I wanted to. Looking back over the day, if I attempted getting the engine in again, I think it would be done quite a lot quicker. For example, time was wasted attaching the manifold and right engine bracket, which only had to come off again as the engine wouldn't fit with them attached. Also, I spent a lot of time fussing over the starter motor. The build manual talked about items which I just did not have with my starter motor kit. It transpires that I had a simpler starter motor kit than that described in the build manual, so the build manual did not describe the kit that I had.

Getting the engine in is most definatley not a one person job. We got most of it in with two people with one person operating the engine hoist (i.e., lowering/highering and moving in/out the engine) and the second person moving the gearbox into place over the chassis cross member. For us, a third person made the job easier as they were able to try and keep the engine from swinging too much on the hoist using the rope we had attached to the tail housing and passed back trough the rear of the car.

Also, I had to go to Halfords as I did not have any hex adaptors that are required to be attached to the torque wrench to torque up the hex bolts.

Last piece of advice....don't do the engine installation on such a hot day! Unbelieveably, after all this I was actually too tired to go to the pub.

29th September 2007

A bit of a frustrating day today as I had to go out to buy some tools to help with the fitting of some of the parts. I needed a longer extension bar and a universal joint. Also, I needed a 9mm hex drive, which was annoying as the set I had contained an 8mm and 10mm drive already. Halfords didn't have these parts, so had to go to a more specialist shop.

Anyway, after I had these parts I was able to properly torque up the engine mountings and gearbox. Part of the process here was to ensure that the gearbox was accurately in place on its slotted mountings. The requirement is to try and achieve equal clearance within the transmission tunnel. The build manual mentions that it is important to take care here because clearences are tight and poor alignment can result in the gearbox contacting the chassis under cornering. It is quite hard to achieve because the gearbox is not symmetrical, but I found a point which marked the 'centre' of the gearbox, and got this within a millimetre of centre so am happy with that. With the gearbox and engine mountings torqued correctly this then meant that I was able to take the engine hoist away, which is good news as it takes up quite a lot of room.

Also today, I fitted the gear lever to the top of the gearbox tailshaft housing. This is just fitted with three set screws and torqued to the correct setting. This was quite straightforward as it was easy to line the bottom of gear lever with the connection inside the gear box.

A couple of items had to be attached to the gearbox, which are accessed from inside the cockpit. Firstly, the reverse light switch had to be fitted and conencted to the loom, which was quite easy. Secondly, the speed sensor had to be screwed into the 'top hat' (which was attached prior to the gearbox going in the car). This was slightly more tricky because the speeds gear output shaft is kind of traingular in profile. Matching this up to the top hat was reasonbly tricky due to the fact that access was very limited. For both of these parts, there are rubber grommits that cover the holes in the cockpit, but I am currently missing these

Finally today, made an attempt at connecting the clutch cable to the top of the clutch pedal. This has to be routed under the (top) engine bay diaganol chassis tube and up towards the pedal box. The pedal box cover has to be removed, and the clutch cable should connect to the clutch pedal using a clevis pin and split pin. Again, unfortuantely these bits are missing so cannot complete this activity, or adjust the cluctch cable at this stage.