Engine In!

 

New clutch in

So the day arrived that the engine could have a trial fit in the chassis! First thing to do was reattached the gear box after putting in a new clutch. Decided to go for a standard Exedy clutch since I am not planning to put more power into it and wanted good driveability.

Gearbox attached

Gearbox was reattached after cleaning up the clutch lever and renewing the bearing. Bolts all torqued to spec in Haynes manual.

Getting the engine in the bay is an absolute pain in the bits for a newbie. Thanks to my father in law and a lot of swearing we managed to get the engine and gearbox located on the mounts. I had to remove the mounts and alternator to get the engine in. I also needed to remove the water pipe on the exhaust side of the engine since it clashed with a chassis rail, will deal with that another time. I used lots of protection on the areas most prone to clashes which kept any marking of the chassis to a minimum.

And it's in - finally starting to look a bit more car like

After the initial euphoria of the engine being in I decided to check if I 'got lucky' with the clutch lever position. I heard a few builds using a Mazda 1.8 VVT engine ended up with a clash between the clutch lever and the drivers footwell panel.

Bugger

With the engine as far forward as possible, once the freeplay was taken out of the clutch lever position, there was only 5mm clearance from the lever to the footwell panel. The throw of the lever is around 10mm to disengage the clutch, so no chance of that happening here.

Trawling the GBS owners Facebook group I saw a number of solutions ranging from a clever mod of the clutch lever (which required welding, so not in my meagre skill set), allowing a clash with the chassis, and grinding the clutch lever down. The worst one was someone suggesting to cut into the panel and chassis.....

None of those were for me because I can't weld and the other solutions didn't sound very sensible from an engineering point of view (and I am an engineer of sorts). Also, on principle I thought given the chassis is designed for the Mazda (the ideal donor as advertised), this should not happen. So I contacted GBS to see what they could offer.

Turns out Matt had one in the workshop with the same issue and he had specced some new engine mounts to shift the engine 10mm forward to get that one through the IVA. After what seemed like lots of calls and discussions, and waiting a while for Rich to make a decision, a way forward was found. I agreed to beta test the new engine mounts and provide some feedback..... to be continued.