1975 MGB GTV8 Special

So the reason for all my profanities - yup you guessed correctly, it was engine install time... on my own - what could possibly go wrong? 

"Pah, that's easy, I do that all the time" I can hear you all say. Well yes, quite possibly, but in this instance things are rather tight, there are additions that this car was not originally designed to have installed and there is an order of doing things. Which of course I completely forgot/ignored in the interests of trying to get the job done - a small army will be employed/bribed when there is paint on the shell and it's going in for real.

Starting with a nice empty engine bay, the first job was to drop the car off the dollies and lower it to the floor


Which in all fairness is exactly what happened as of course there are no springs in the front subframe yet  .

I took the engine off the stand, removed the front cover to give me a little more room just in case, and slowly lowered it into the bay


and that was my first mistake - can you spot the minor omission?

Yup, the headers needed to be pre-inserted into the holes before the engine was lowered. So out it all came again, headers installed and loosely held in place with cable to stop the engine hitting them on the way down... except it then wouldn't fit with the headers in place despite them being tied back.

Lift engine out again, untie headers, enlarge the wing holes being careful not to take too much and render the strengtheners redundant, repeat the cabling of headers, lower engine once more.

This time I noticed the engine mount bolts were too long and so wouldn't go past the chassis rails... lift engine back out, wind nuts on to the mounts, take a grinder to the threads, wind nuts off the threads, clean everything off and repeat again. Nope, still not enough room for the headers

Repeat the above a few more times until the pile of small offcuts had grown into what you saw at the end of my last update 

Eventually however...  


However it's not perfect - did I mention it was a bit tight?


Some more tidying required there then!

I decided I'd earned a beer at that point, so called it a good day's work. That and the next job on the list was the gearbox which I really couldn't (or even had the strength to) face at that moment in time.

Probably a good job too as it turned out...