Mounting the Engine!

With my parents in town and my dad ready to spend some time in the garage, it was finally time to hang the engine. The long story short, this was a lot easier than the stories I heard with the motor mount not lining up to the mounting ears. With the engine load leveler on the hoist, this is actually a one person job (its not like you are trying to get the engine bell housing bolts in place while laying under a car!)

I would say the thing that took the most amount of time was getting the lower mounting ear bolts torqued. Not that it was impossible, it was a bit annoying and I ended up taking the rear down tubes off of the sump to get at the nuts.

I am happy to say that everything fit first try. That said, I am going to pop the engine off and re-weld my cross bar on the engine mount. I previously lowered the cross bar in order to clear the sump. I will admit, that when I measured everything up, I never fully mounted the engine mount to the engine. I was looking for about 1/2" of clearance, which I did end up getting... And then I torqued the engine mounts and took the weight off of the engine. I ended up with about 3/32" of an inch when all was said and done. While that may be fine, there is no reason not to re-weld this because it is going to take me all of an hour to take the engine off and put it back on. Plus, since I have procrastinating some building I have been doing a lot of 4130 TIG welding to keep my skills up. 1/16" 2% ceriated tungsten with some 1/16" ER70S-2 does a much better job than my previous 3/32 setup.