01/17/04 - Borrowed an engine hoist from a friend (thanks Kevin!) and hauled it home in anticipation of finally getting the engine in. I had finished the engine and chassis rewiring months earlier and I was getting sick of seeing it sitting on the floor in front of the chassis. I spent Saturday installing new SS brake lines on the rear suspension and torquing everything to spec. The rear suspension is finally completely done, well except for getting the rotors cleaned up.

I installed a new fuel filter in the engine compartment, had the alternator tested to verify it was still good. Ok, that's not exactly true - I had two alternators and I knew one of them came from the junker engine that was in the DX chassis, but I couldn't tell which one was the good one. So I had them both tested and kept the best one.

01/18/04 - With some help from a friend (thanks Dave!) I got the engine ready for installation.

The header I had on order still hadn't shown up as I had hoped. I'll just install it later with the engine in place, shouldn't be too much trouble (remind me later that I wrote that). There were only two challenging tasks in this part of the project. The first was finding all of the bolts and engine mounts I had stowed away nearly two years ago. I found one set of mounts that were pretty cruddy and while washing them off I remembered cleaning another set of mounts a long time ago, all I had to do was find them. After much searching they turned up in an old toolbox I haven't touched in, well, about two years.

The second difficulty came from trying to install the new Energy Suspension mount bushings I ordered from Suspension Restoration Co. (highly recommended for ES stuff). They were all labeled correctly, but that didn't help much when I couldn't remember which mount went where from just looking at them (two years...). It was kinda like figuring out a Chinese jigsaw puzzle, but Dave is pretty bright so I only needed to show him how half of them went. :-)

Anyway, now the engine is in and all the important bolts are torqued. The ones I couldn't reach with the torque wrench probably don't matter that much anyhow. All that's left is to hook up all the wiring, fuel lines, vacuum lines, cables, axles, and such. Shouldn't be too much trouble...

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