What I wouldn’t give to be 30 again. Well, I wasn’t very bright when I was 30 so I have become less stupid. It’d be a helova combination tho to be 30 again and also less stupid.
My first effort was to get the early/late water pump adapter installed while the engine was still out and I had easy access to everything. The early model pump has a port that goes to the coolant reservior. We’ll call that the “early port”. The late model pump doesn’t have the port but does have a fastening point for late model coolant tube that goes across the front of the engine. We’ll call that the “late pump fastening point”. My aftermarket radiator needs the late tube so I wanted that fastening point. Therefore I needed a hose adapter so my late pump could have an early port.
Late pump with it’s fastening point, sitting next to the adapter that provides the “early port”.
My last adapter was crushed in the crash but Chuck Baader made me another. The problem was I couldn’t quite get it to work. After cutting it down a bunch, doing a bunch of twisting so test fits indicated that the distributor cap would clear it, what kicked my ass was the hose to the thermostat housing. For money or love I just couldn’t get it on to the adapter. Soon it was 9:30PM and I’d really not completed a single useful task in what was becoming a serious time crunch effort. I decided that I needed to step back and reconsider this.
–I could convert to a late coolant system by swapping out thermostat housings and modifying it to work.
–I could convert to an complete early cooling system by swapping water pumps and sucking up the fact that the late steel cooling tube would be poorly attached.
–I could think out of the box.
I got out of the box. I tried to understand just how our coolant reservior bottle worked. It’s the highest point in the system, it’s at more-or-less a pressure equilibrium with the radiator, and it has a pressure relieve valve for overflow. What would happen if I tried to run the weekend without it? My after market radiator is pretty tall so it would be the highest point. It will happily take a conventional pressure relief valve radiator cap so that’s taken care of…Hmmm. It might just work. So that’s what I’m going to try to do. I won’t connect the coolant overflow bottle for the weekend and we’ll see what happens. I’ll bring some hoses and stuff to the track just in case it turns out to be a bad idea.
Half of the night was gone forever,and I’d not done a damned thing. But the problems were just starting.
I couldn’t get the damned motor mounts in to save my life. One of the charms of OEM motormounts is that they have a stud coming out of both sides. That kind of motor mount can help you get the engine to make it the last 2" of “there, it’s in place”. But my motor mounts have a single bolt that goes thru so instead of the mount mount helping, it makes getting the engine the last 2" of in place harder. To make things worse, the exhaust downtubes were hung on the new sway bar and pressing up on the exhaust manifold studs.
As a result, the closer I got the engine to being exactly in place, the more the exhaust downtubes worked to prevent me from moving the motor.
After fighting it a while I decided that there was no way I was going to get this done unless my cheap old Harbor Freight hoist could go farther forward. So I removed my air dam and front bumper in order to win 4". I’m not quite sure how I was able to do this all the other times w/o removing the front bumper, but this time is was not going to work.
I drove on trying to get the motormounts to line up. After failing for a while, I decided that it might help if I got the tranny cross bar in place so the engine would be closer to the right angle. So alternately raising the car’s lift and raising the engine hoist a couple inches at a time until the car lift got to the first safety catch, I lifted the car up 18" or so. Then I got under the car and spent 20min benchpressing the tranny with one hand while I fastened the tranny brace cross-piece in place.
That done I went back and fought the motor mounts a while longer and by 11PM had them both in place. By midnight I had removed the tranny brace that I’d installed backwards and put it on correctly, with the tranny mounts this time. All requiring lots more bench pressing of the tranny. I also connected the shift linkage.
At midnight I was fastening up the clutch slave when, to my horrer, it slipped in with no resistance. The slave piston rod didn’t seem to be pushing on anything. I layed there under the car for a couple minutes trying to understand what might have gone wrong with my clutch, pivot pin, fork, and throwout bearing install. I couldn’t come up with a way I could have screwed it up. There aren’t enough parts to forget something and you can’t do any of that stuff backwards, so what could I have screwed up? The idea of pulling the engine out again and separating tranny from engine was too painful to bear. I decided to go ahead and fasten up the slave and then see if I had resistance at the clutch pedal.
And I did. So maybe it’s ok.
Filthy and exhausted I shut down the effort at 12:30, had a beer, checked out the forums, watched some of the Rolex NJ recording and then took a shower with a stiff scrub brush.