Engine out again ... in the snow!

Saturday 9th January 2010 - Work time = 5hrs ... Build Time To Date = 84hrs

I spoke to Mark in Technical Support at Westfield earlier in the week.  He confirmed that the engine was in the right place, the adaptor plate was not required but I would need to drill new mounting holes in the chassis mounted gearbox plate and that it would be best to relocate the wiring loom to the side rather than lower edge of the chassis rail over the tunnel.  The power of the internet also helped and I got a blog comment from Robbo in Holland who also confirmed the above.  Robbo also highlighted the need to re-route the wiring loom for the starter motor.  Robbo's Westfield build is at http://westfieldfw.blogspot.com/ (you may need Google Translate!).

With Henry's help it was fairly straightforward to get the engine back out. 

As you can see it's been snowing a lot here ... but we managed to complete the engine removal before it started snowing again.

With the engine bay empty I proceeded to drill the gearbox mounting plate.  Prior to removing the engine I'd marked the mounting holes.  I'm wasn't too happy with the location of the new holes (they're the ones at the right of the plate in the LHD picture) and also the fact that only the rear half of the gearbox rubber mounting would be resting on the plate.  I decided to modify the extra adaptor plate and mount this on top of the welding in plate (see RHD picture).  Note the pictures are before I've painted them to cover up the scuffs etc.  This new arangement will offer a bit more support and spread the load.  It will raise the gearbox slightly but this hopefully should not be an issue.

When the engine was installed I noticed the very limited access from below to fill and check the gearbox oil.  So I marked the position of the filler plug before we removed the engine and then cut an access hole in the passenger footwell.  I tried to use a hole cutter to cut the hole but all it did was make a mess ... good job no-one will see it once the gearbox is back in.  The cover plate is fixed from inside the footwell with small bolts into some rivnuts in the bulkhead panel.  It should be slightly easier now to fil/check the gearbox oil.

Final task for the day was to make a couple of plates to cover the unused inertia seat belt cut-outs in the rear bulkhead panel.

 

5 hours work time ... unfortunately not an awful lot to show for it!