Well just a quick update this week, mostly because I didn't get a lot of pictures. As I said last week, we dropped the car off at Hot Rods by Huber in Stillman Valley to get the brake lines done, and we picked it up Friday afternoon. Apparently our idea of having the lines done was a good one. They had problems flaring the stainless line even with a very expensive Snap-On Hydraulic tool! Here is a couple of shitty pics of the front lines under the hood. I don't know why they all turned out like crap, but you get the idea anyway.
Thats all that is worth posting right now. When we get the car up in the air and get the wheels off I will have a couple more (and they wont suck).
Now that the brake lines are in, we can move on to the real wokr....putting in the motor! If you have never installed a motor in a 4th gen F-body, let me tell you it is a pain in the ***. It took muscle, sweat, a load leveler, some jacks, some cutting, and brain power to get that SOB in. I had my camera in the house over night and it fogged up when I brought it outside, so the pics don't start until part way through the process.
Here you can see where we cut the center of the cowl out to give the motor and the leveler clearance to go backward. Unfortunately that only got us so far, and the chains on the back were touching the windshield. So we put the back of the motor on a jack and un-did the rear chains.
Then we moved the leveler all the way forward so that the back of it would go up over the windshield (and give us some more room with the hoist).
With the motor on the jack we were able to go back far enough to line the mounts up with the saddles, but we couldn't lower the motor (since we had to take the handle off of the jack to get it under the car). So then we had to jack the car up to the motor and muscle it the rest of the way. But after not to long it was in the car and off the hoist!!!
Here you can see the solid mounts from Midwest Chassis, and the jack in the background
Once the motor was in the car we began the planning stages for the rest of the work we need to do. We have a lot to package in the car, and not so much room. Once we laid out how/where we were going to put the battery, the water pump, the catch can, and the regulator we started to plumb the fuel system from the back. Here you can see the lines feeding the back of the rails, we are actually going to change the fittings from the straights to 90's so the line isn't bent so tight. You can also see the fuel pressure regulator mounted and the return line ready to be terminated.
Here you can see where the -8 comes from the filter into the "Y" and splits to two -6's to feed the rails. It is in this location for a couple of reasons but mostly so we can get at it easily.
That is as far as we got while I was still taking pictures. At that point we started to plumb the rails to the regulator and needed to install the alternator to see how it would affect the routing of lines. Well it turns out that caused a couple of problems. The first, and most obvious one, was the clearance on the passenger side rail. Because of its position we will need to change the hose end for that side (if you are keeping track we have needed to change quite a few fittings from what we planned without the car in front of us). The second problem brings up back to the water pump, again. The alternator bracket that we have used a piece that bolted on to a part of the factory water pump (as far as we can tell). As you all know the factory water pump is long gone, and so is the factory replacement electric (because of the alternator ironical enough), so out comes the welder to fix that problem. After staring at it for a while, and trying my hardest to convince Chris to just get rid of the alternator all together and go to a 16v system he finally came up with a solution. Ill have pictures of it later, but basically it is a piece of flat stock that bolts to two existing holes in the head, and then two braces that come up to support the lower part of the bracket. It was easy enough to make, and it solved the problem.
That is all for now, but we should be only a couple of weekends worth of work from getting this thing running again! Thanks for looking!
Sean
