Happy new year!   I closed out 2019 with a flurry of effort to get Derby ready for Vintage! I’ll be registering later today.

With the holiday break upon us I decided to put in some extra hours in the garage.  I enlisted help from my brother and we made some major progress.

We picked up the engine and lowered it onto the front subframe. After securing the engine mounts and attracting the transmission and we rolled the assembly over to the front of the car on a moving dolly. 

One of the neat things that I did was to put a 2x6 on top of the rear jack stands perpendicular to length of the car and at the fulcrum point (imagine a teeter totter). This allowed me to easily lift the front of the car and roll the engine underneath for install. I was worried about it sliding off the back, but we were lucky this didn’t happen. I would urge caution if you try this.  We place some boxes of papers at the rear of the car to soften the blow if it did slide back.

Once we had the engine under the car, we quickly realized that we were not going to get it installed with the the stahl header attached.  So the bolts came off the header. After that the engine went in with little effort and we secured it with new bolts.  We placed a jack stand under the transmission.  I will have to wait to get the rear subframe and LSD installed so I can align the drive shaft and determine where to place the transmission mounts. 

Hurray!!!!!!!! Seeing the rebuilt upgraded engine in the engine bay just makes me smile. 

So a bit less exciting but another major milestone was that were able to pull the rebuilt rear subframe off my parts car. Place it on a dolly and roll it into the garage. Then we installed the rear subframe from Derby onto the parts car.

The rear subframe is covered in oil, grease and road grime. I did replace the bushings in 2016 and I’m contemplating whether it needs new bushings now while it’s out of the car.  I only drove 5000 miles on them so I’m thinking no....more on the rear subframe in another blog post.

So I did forget two things that caused me some concern.  First I forgot to attach the reverse light wires and second I don’t think I banged out enough space for the  getrag 245 slave cylinder (it’s very close to the tunnel wall if not slightly touching. All easily remedied by dropping the subframe/engine/trans again.  However I don’t really want to do that.  I can actually see and reach the connection for the reverse light wires from the engine bay. So that will likely be an easy fix.  Now what to do about not having banged out enough space for the slave cylinder...hmm.

Also  I’m super glad I made the master clutch connection to slave cylinder before installation. I don’t think this would be possible with the transmission installed.

A special thanks to my brother, his drive, help and guidance was critical.  

Enjoy the pictures.