Insertion

Session 17: Saturday 30th January

This was a really, really quick one. The aim was simply to have every last nut and bolt test-fitted in place, so that there were no nasty surprises in either the number or the fit of the components needed to mount the engine and gearbox into the chassis.

The engine is suspended from two arms, one to the left and one to the right. These each have a single bolt at the end, which passes through a rubber vibration mount, that's held by two bolts into the chassis. At the rear, there's a plate that bolts to the underside of the chassis which connects to the gearbox by two additional bolts. That's it. Four bolts hold all 150kg of engine and gearbox in place.

All components located, test-fitted and labelled, the engine was ready for installation. However, that being a day's work on its own, that had to be left for another day.

One of the rubber engine mounts.

Session 18: Sunday 31st January

This process was flagged as being a two-person job. My feeling going into this process was that the main role of the second person was to dial 999 in the event of the first person becoming trapped under something heavy. In the end, having a second pair of eyes was useful, a second pair of hands to fetch and pass tools was useful, and the company on a stressful part of the build was definitely useful.

I'd long earlier concluded that the drill here would be to move the car to the engine, not the other way round. On the hoist, the engine was a pendulum. The chassis could be manoeuvred a few centimetres without immediately recoiling back. That turned out to be sensible. So, the hoist was positioned in the doorway and the chassis slowly offered up to the engine.

Once the chassis was in position under the engine, the load on the hoist could then be tipped, so that the gearbox was pointing into the engine bay. This was necessary as, in position, the gearbox sits under the dashboard and between the passengers, and so can't just be dropped into place.

The process starts with lining everything up...

So, the gearbox enters first, passes underneath the battery and carefully sliding past an expensive-looking connector for the engine management system. This was a constant flow of small adjustments, dropping the hoist a little, moving the chassis forward a little. It all went relatively smoothly, if slowly. It was definitely a tight fit and you can definitely see why they asked for the engine to be undressed first.

Then it got stuck. An awful lot of exploration later established that we'd actually lowered it too much. I'd naively assumed that the chassis would sit to the left and right of the gearbox. It turns out that it sits around it, i.e. some of the chassis struts sit under the gearbox, preventing it from being removed from below.

Threading the gearbox through the chassis begins

Putting to one side that this would seem to be an arrangement designed to increase maintenance costs, the net effect was that the gearbox was wedging itself in the chassis, so needed backing up and reinserting higher up.

The instructions suggested attaching everything loosely and tightening up bit by bit. Starting at the back seemed to make sense. Getting the plate and the bolts to all line up took forever, not helped by the only access being from below, with the chassis inches from the ground.

Nearly there.

Throughout, I was very conscious that we were quite committed at this point, and even more so once this plate was in place, as then if the engine arms couldn't be made to fit then the plate would have to come off again in order to extract the engine.

Eventually, everything lined up and the bolts could be tightened. As an aside, it was very sensible that I took the radiator off, as it would definitely have been hit by the hoist at some point and/or prevented the engine from going in.

I have no clue why the instructions had the radiator going on first. That's clearly madness.

And in.

Getting the arms onto the engine was fiddly, but fine. The vibration mounts had been pre-tested and so were the work of moments. But then the big bolt kept cross-threading. In the end, it seemed that the best plan was to fit the big bolt off the car, and then introduce the arm-and-vibration-mount as a subassembly. This made the bolts from the arms into the engine even fiddlier (including small adjustments to the hoist to get everything to line up) but ultimately won the day.

That was easily the longest session so far. Ultimately successful, but a job that took a long time, with no opportunity for a break.

Left mounting arm in situ

Right mounting arm in situ

Gearbox mounting plate in situ

Closing shot of the day. Engine in place, and ready for all the bits that had to be taken off to be put back on. The foam pipe lagging was there to protect the frame whilst the engine went in, and was needed as it turned out. The fit is really that tight.

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