Back to the harmonic balancer pulley. It has to be as close to the engine timing chain cover as possible, to minimize the notch required in the car frame to give it clearance. I put some modelling clay on the timing chain cover and installed the pulley, and then took it off. By measuring the thickness of the clay, I could see that the pulley could be moved about .10" closer to the cover.
Pulling the spacer out would mean taking off the cover again, so I took the easy way out and machined the shaft portion of the pulley; ends up doing the same thing, letting the pulley move closer to the engine. This is an action shot! If you look closely you can see the machining curl coming off the tool. I machined .10" off the shaft.
The pulley back on. This is as close as it can be to the engine; there is about .010" clearance with the timing chain cover. May not look like it, but the closest it comes is the "nose" part of the cover which is inside the pulley diameter (you can see this in the clay picture at the top of the page).
Engine/tranny assembly on the cradle. This should be very close to the final position, according to all of the measurements that I took. The front of the engine is supported on this mount, and several more will be made up. They will all be solid mounts, no rubber. The Fiero has rubber isolators between the cradle and the car frame so that should provide enough isolation from the engine vibration. I am replacing the rubber isolators with polyurethane since the rubber sometimes lets things move around a little too much, and the rear suspension arms are mounted to the cradle; thus movement of the cradle means movement of the suspension arms.
The transmission mount tack-welded to the cradle for a test fitting in the car. The mount is a 3/16" thick plate welded to a piece of angle iron that will be welded to the cradle once the position is confirmed to be correct.
The 2 pieces of the mount before welding them together.
Note to self: remove plastic clamp before welding next time as the heat does nasty things to it!
It fits!!
This is the first of many, many, test fittings. It may be a little hard to see what this is showing. This is standing at the drivers side rear wheel. The rear window of the car is at the left and the trunk (which is behind the engine in the car) is at the right in this picture.
This showed me a number of things. The forward header was hitting the heater hoses that run up the forward bulkhead. The alternator, while not being attached here, was going to foul with the fuel lines running in the same area. The frame notch was marked for cutting. The valve covers had to be removed since they were the very tall ones (all I had) and the forward one was hitting the deck lid hinge box on the right side of the car. OK, time to pull the engine again and take care of some of these things.
This is looking at the forward bulkhead from inside the engine compartment. The 2 large lines in the middle are the heater hoses (remember this is a mid-engine car, so they run forward to the radiator). The smaller, very rusty lines, are the fuel lines and filter. They run to the tank which is the lump just to the left of the heater hoses.
I've relocated the heater hoses out of the way of the exhaust header. Also, I've taken off the fuel lines, both the pressure and the return line, and the filter and all the retaining clips. Neatens things up a bit. I'll make up some fuel lines later and run them where there is more room.
OK, it fits even better now. The heater hoses clear the header nicely. The bad news is that they now hit the alternator. Oh well, I'll have to move them again...no big deal. The new valve covers (picked up a set at the annual Barrie swap meet) just barely clear the hinge box, even with the box cut down a little. Also, I put a carburetor and air cleaner on to take the picture and noticed how high the engine sits.
The reason for the interference with the hinge box and the engine sitting too high is because I used the upper mount holes in the front engine mounting plate. I'm going to lower it down to the lower set of holes and re-do the tranny mount to lower that side as well. This may mean moving the engine/tranny a little to the right . The notch I cut in the car frame (to clear the engine front pulley) is fairly small, so I can cut it a little deeper to accomodate the engine postion plus any movement when it is running. This will also lower the centre of gravity of the engine/tranny package, which would be a good thing as well.
The engine and transmisson mounts were welded up from 3/16" thick plate and angle iron. These are welded to the cradle and then the engine/tranny bolt onto them. There are 4 mounts that were fabricated. The front engine one is the large U-shaped piece that bolts to the front of the engine and sets the height for the other mounts. As it is mounted in the Fiero, the engine sits transverse, with the "front" of the engine on the right side of the car. So sometimes I call this the front engine mount and sometimes call it the right side mount. I'll try and be clearer now and call them the right side mount (previously known as the front engine mount) and the left side mount (previously known as the rear transmission mount). Then there are 2 other mounts, which are on the front and back of the transmission, as it sits in the car. The front one is a 2-piece mount which makes installing the engine onto all the mounts a lot easier. The rear mount is actually an anti-torque rod which will help keep the engine from rocking back and forth. So the engine/tranny is mounted in 4 locations.
This is the right side mount. The large U-shaped bracket bolts onto this to support the front of the engine
This is the left mount that supports the transmission. It is kind of a stepped design since I had to cut down the original one to lower the engine, and I wanted to save as much of it as I could.
OK, time to move onto page 4 of this V8 Fiero project - click here