4/14/09

So it is now 0800 h on Saturday morning. I'm just about to roll out of bed. Just kidding, I'm at the shop already as we’d scheduled to meet there at that time to get the engine and transmission out of Shichi. I've brought Big Millie so I can install the new fiber-optic sights before we start. I do this. I use the calipers to center up the sights in the dovetails, asbestos I can, and tighten them down. Me likee the new sights! I haven’t had a chance to try them out to see if they are any more accurate, or if I've even gotten them remotely sighted in, but they do show a very nice sight picture. I've always hated the Heinie “Straight Eight” sights that came on the gun. They suck ass. Anyhoo, with that job done, I settled in to wait for John to arrive. I had a look at the floor-mount pedals that I had removed from the Fauxbra back in 2004 to see what it would take to make them firewall mount. See, when you hang floor-mount pedals upside down, the arc causes the foot pad to swing up and away from you making it impossible to drive. I still cannot understand why the idiot who built that car used them in that way. Oh right, he’s an idiot. Anyhoo, I decided to cut a kerf out, bend the pedal and zook it back together. I was in the process of doing that when John arrived. He had a grille he wanted to strip the paint off of so we both worked on separate projects for a bit. Eventually we got to work on Shichi. We rolled his car out and Shichi over, then put his car in the paint booth for the time being. Oh, we also carried the tool table over from the paint booth. With the car in place and ready to work on, we got to looking at the steering shaft which needed to come out. Of course, it wouldn’t clear the crank pulley. We fought with it for a while and decided that we’d yank the shaft as we lifted the engine away from the motor mounts. John reached under the car and undid the transmission cross member bolts but couldn’t get the speedometer cable out. Again, we decided to undo that as the engine came up. I hope we can remember all of this crap as it is going back in. We’ll see. Once we were sure everything was disconnected and ready for us to pull, we rolled the hoist over and began the search for the lifting chain. We never found it. We wound up using a tie-down strap under the oil pan to lift it out. It worked pretty well, actually. Once we had the engine and transmission out and cleaned up the inevitable coolant spill, we grabbed Gil’s engine and set it next to the one we just removed. The plan was for me to swap over anything needing over-swapping later in the day or Sunday so we could look at installing it on Wednesday and hopefully be running next weekend. Damn, I just jinxed it, didn’t I? Oh well. We locked up and headed to Free Bird’s for lunch then John went, I assume, home. I went to Steve’s Foreign Auto to see if he had a head gasket. He did and he didn’t. He didn’t in that he had none as just head gaskets. He did in that he had some complete engine gasket sets. I bought all five sets, just to be safe. Then I went back to the shop to do the over-swapping of parts. I removed the starter and the transmission from the dead motor and set them aside. I pulled the clutch pressure plate and set the bolts aside for the new motor. I drug the impact wrench over and undid the flywheel bolts then marveled at just how friggin’ heavy a stock A-series flywheel is. I grabbed Explodotron, remember the flywheel Marty had lightened so much that it is actually a bit scary, and lined up the bolt holes. I reused the flywheel bolts and torque them to 62 foot/lbs. I fingered out which clutch disc was going to work, I'm reusing the one from the A-15 since it had the most meat left of the two which fit the transmission, and installed the pressure plate. I didn’t have an alignment tool so I found a socket which almost fit the pilot bushing and another that almost fit the clutch disc and jammed the smaller into the larger. This combination used as an alignment tool. I torque the bolts, or at least tried, to the spec in the book. Of course the second one stretched and broke. I decided that the book’s number wasn’t right and went to work removing the broken bolt from the flywheel. With that chiseled out I reinstalled the pressure plate and replaced the broken bolt. This time I just hunkered down on them with the long ratchet and called it good. Of course the half assed alignment tool didn’t work. I could not get the transmission to seat. I decided to sacrifice a 1200 four-speed, the one that was already halfway disassembled under the bench. I chop-sawed off the input shaft, after making sure the splines were the same as the pressure plate, and cleaned up the cut end. This I used as an alignment tool to great success. The transmission slid right into place and bolted up cleanly. Oh, I almost forgot something. Well, I almost forgot to mention it; I didn’t almost forget to install it. The plate between the engine and transmission was swapped over from the old engine to the new one before installing Explodotron. I contemplated lightening it like we did on the turbo engine but thought better of having those holes in the flywheel exposed to the world under the car. So, with the engine that close to being ready to install, I called it a day and washed up to go home. Sunday was Easter so I had to hang out with mom most of the day. So now the car is waiting for us to reinstall the engine, swap the head, reconnect everything, and hoon. I think we’ll get most of that done tomorrow evening. Hopefully.