Engine & Gearbox Installation - Part 4 - It's in! (Eventually)

Finally, the day arrived when I was ready to install the engine into the chassis.

Everything was perfect, the sun was shining, the engine was suspended from my new engine crane, I had protected the tubular bracing on the chassis with some foam padding, my son had got out of bed to help out, and I had even remembered to alter the orientation of the thermostat housing on the front of the engine prior to installation.

The thermostat housing pointing the wrong way...

...and now the right way!

Unfortunately, things did not all go quite as planned.

From reading other build blogs, I was aware that, due to the tubular bracing on the AK Gen III chassis, the engine installation is made easier by getting the rear of the chassis as high as possible relative to the front.

To achieve the necessary attitude, all we would have to do was remove the axle stands supporting the front of the chassis.  However, when we tried to manoeuvre the engine crane into position, the legs of the engine crane would not fit underneath the front wishbones.  There was a short interlude, while we jacked the front of the car back up and supported it on axle stands adjusted to keep the front as low as possible while allowing the engine crane legs to pass under the suspension.  We then repeated that operation to avoid the engine crane legs hitting the axle stands...

Once the path was clear for the crane, actually getting the engine into place was quite easy.  The task was made much easier by using a load-leveller to be able to tilt the gearbox downwards.  It was then a case of inching the crane forward and slowly lowering the engine while raising the gearbox to get it into the chassis between all the bracing.

Almost there...

This was definitely a two-person task, especially as the gearbox was a very tight fit between the brake and fuel lines running along the inner chassis rails; there are a lot of lumps and bumps on the T56 gearbox that kept wanting to get caught up on the lines and a second person guiding the gearbox out of harm's way was essential.

Once we had the front pulley over the top suspension cross-member, we could get the engine down and level and sat onto the four engine bobbins that I had placed onto the chassis engine mounts prior to installing (these were just installed loose at this time).

We then supported the end of the gearbox on a trolley jack, removed the engine crane and lifting chains and had a well-earned cup of tea.

...and it's in!

After the tea break, the day took a slight turn for the worse.

Firstly I noticed that, despite our best endeavours, during installation one of the lugs on the gearbox had caught on and crushed one of the fuel lines; as a precaution, while raising and lowering the gearbox to install the gearbox mount, I removed the fuel and brake lines to avoid any further mishaps.  One piece of good luck was that the location of all my brake and fuel mounting clips all managed to miss clashing with the various sticky-out bits of the gearbox!

The next issue was that I could not get the tail shaft of the gearbox to sit centrally within the chassis due to one of the aforementioned lugs on the gearbox hitting part of the chassis bracing.  This needed me to break out the die grinder and a carbide bit and gently remove the offending lug.

Tailshaft not sitting centrally within chassis rails...

...due to this lug clashing with tubular bracing.

After some "light" fettling with the die grinder...

...offending lug is no more!

This now allowed me to get the gearbox aligned properly within the chassis and so the next task was to bolt the cross-member to the gearbox mount so that the holes in the chassis rail could be marked and drilled.

Except that the holes in my gearbox mount didn't match the holes in the cross-member.  When I ordered my chassis from AK my original plan had been to use a Tremec TKO600 gearbox and clearly that was what the cross-member I had was for.  For some reason, I had assumed the T56 cross-member would be the same, but on checking with AK, Jon advised that the mount was indeed different.  No problem, AK despatched me a new mount and I had that in my hands within the week.

New T56 cross-member (top) compared to TKO version (bottom)

Great - except that didn't fit either.  Firstly the holes still did not quite align with the holes in the gearbox mount.  Although they were only just out; so I reworked the holes slightly with a file to widen them out a bit until I could get the bolts into the gearbox mount.  But then I discovered that the cross-member was too wide!  Where it actually locates on the chassis is where the floorplans start to drop down below the level of the chassis rails and so the cross-member hit the floorplans and wouldn't sit tight up against the rails.  Also, I couldn't just cut down the new AK cross-member as the location of the cut would pass right through the holes for mounting to the chassis, so if I was to drill new holes there would not be much metal left between holes and the end of the cross-member.  

So I decided to order a length of 50mm wide steel bar stock and make my own cross-member.  I measured and drilled the holes for the mount first, these were 11mm in diameter to suit the bolts supplied with the gearbox mount.  I could then fix the bar to the gearbox and raise the gearbox until the bar was flat against the floor pans to mark where to cut it so that it would sit between the pans and against the chassis rails.  I also decided to only use a single 10mm bolt to fix each side of the cross-member but to install a threaded boss into the chassis rail (as per my fuel tank fixing) to provide a greater length of threaded connection.

Home fabricated mount (top) - spot the difference in length!

Threaded boss made from 20mm diameter bar

Cross-member installed and bolted into place

I will need to remove the mount again at some point in the future a) to powder coat or paint it and b) to facilitate reinstallation of the fuel lines.  But the engine and gearbox are finally in and this feels like a really big step forward in terms of progress on the build!