Engine Test Fit Part 1

 After the last two days I am tired and ready to take a break. I did my first test fit of my 2.3l SVO engine into the chassis. I figured out a rig where I put the chassis below my lift and using ratchet straps front and rear I suspend the chassis from the lift. I have to get the roll bar almost touching to have enough room but with the ratchet straps tight I can run the lift up another notch and bring the chassis off the cradle. Then I can lower the chassis down onto a couple of furnature dollies.  Then I can roll the chassis out to the front of the garage where I can get the engine hoist in position. I have to lift up the nose of the chassis and put it on my old ammo case so that the engine hoist has enough room to slide under. This also helps with giving the chassis a little favorable angle to slip the engine in. 

So I had the engine fully mocked-up with the intake manifold, and exhaust manifold and turbocharger package. I also had the bell housing and crank pulley in place - so this approximates the full envelope of the installed engine. I had no illusion that this would actually fit first time but I wanted to know where the interference points were going to be.  What I found was that the starter bulge on the bell housing hit the chassis at the transmission tunnel on the right and the clutch pivot hit on the left. Well, the pivot is not needed because I am going to use a hydraulic throwout bearing - so now I can mock-up the bell housing and see whether removing the pivot will allow the bell housing to be centered in the tunnel without interfering with the starter bulge. 

The next thing to interfere was the water spigot on the underside of the intake manifold lower half. It was pretty obvious by this point that the intake manifold was not going to clear the diagonal frame brace on the driver's side and I could not just remove the intake manifold in situ because the engine lifting lugs use the intake manifold bolts to attach and I could not support the engine in that position. It was also starting to rain and I needed to re-arrange cars so that I could get the TR6 out of the rain. The good news was that I could get the TR6 back onto the lift and still lift the chassis underneath it. So that was all I could do on day 1.