The engine mounts have been slowly coming together.  I finished welding on the passenger side last night.  The driver side still has a few beads to run once the car is off of the jackstands.  I have also almost finished the welding of the new transmission crossmember.

Special thanks to Scott Mackenzie of RMC Engineering for getting us a great deal on our rollcage tubing!  If you ever need any work done to your big-rig trailer, check them out. Now we just need to figure out how to bend this tubing into something resembling a rollcage.

We have also procured a seat.  Unfortunately, this one cant accommodate an anti-submarine (nard-squasher) belt, so we’ll have to get a different one.

Here are some photos from the past month or two.

Ive had the week off, so over the past few days I degreased the engine bay, scraped out several pounds of sound deadening, made some brackets to hold the alternator and Mercedes power steering pump on the 440 (this needs some more work…), made a bracket so that the hoist can conveniently hold the engine from the intake manifold, removed the sway bar, which was wedged in place due to the car being too high because the engine is out of it.  So to fix that, I temporarily  lowered the 440 onto a strap between the framerails where the front bumper used to be.  Then the bar came right out.  By the way, the sway bar makes a great engine-angle-changer while the engine is suspended on the hoist.  One can simply wedge it into the engine mount, and use it as a giant lever.

oh yeah, and I also cut a gigantic hole in the firewall.  I only had to put 2 fires out with the hose. oil soaked rags and plasma cutter sparks are a great combo!  I started to create flanges around the new hole so that hopefully it will be easy to lap-weld a new transmission tunnel in place.  I made an attempt at test fitting the engine, but could not get it all the way in.  Ill need to enlarge the bottom of the hole.  The cardboard template that i was using to transfer the shape of the engine to the firewall didnt have the full width of the rear of the engine taken into account.

enjoy the pictures…

The engine is out!  Hooray!

Here are some of the ideas for themes that have been thrown out there so far…  Which ones are the best?  Note that according to the LeMons forums, pimps/hoes and The A-Team have been done to death, but we could still do them if we decide to pull it off better than everyone else…

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or put other ideas down by using the comments section below…

So I have set up a wordpress site so that we can put car-building pictures and crap up on the internets for everyone to enjoy.  I’ll email everyone a username and password so that everyone can put stuff up here too.