Engine In But Not Happy

July 5, 2016

We mounted the transmission to the engine and spent a few hours getting it in. Isaac and David were helping out.

With the transmission bolted up, the engine had less play and is really tight up against the firewall. We are not happy with it so we installed the drive shaft to see if we had enough play in the spline to move the motor mounts forward an inch to give the engine a bit of space between it and the firewall. It looks like we have a good amount of play so out will come the engine so we can move the motor mount brackets or add some mounting holes an inch or so forward. 

We can move the engine about 2 inches forward before the aircon compressor will hit the front part of the frame. Everything is so tight. It will also give us a chance to bolt up the exhaust headers as installing them while the engine is in is nearly impossible.

While we have the engine in, we started to look at the wiring to see how we could route the looms from the 1997 Lincoln Mark VIII which we will be using for the computer, fuel pump, ignition system with anti-theft and the EFI ( electronic fuel injection). 

It was a real mess as we first just were trying to get an idea of where things would be routed. 

After looking at what remained we realized that we still had some extra circuits that could be cut out since we would be using a second wiring system for lights, AC, gauges, speedo, turn signals...

Cutting out another pile of wires and using zip ties to organize the looms, things are starting to look a whole lot better. Once we are happy with it, we will wrap it to keep the wiring from getting nicked or cut.

We also decided that since we will be taking the engine out again, we should hook it all up outside the cramped quarters of the frame and see if it still runs. If not it will be much easier to troubleshoot on the floor than in the frame. Also, if we give up on the donor car wiring, it will be easier to install a new wiring loom without having to work it through the routing holes we would make with the donor wiring loom.

In the next few days, we will be taking the engine out once again.