Well, good news and less good news. The good news is that I fit the engine and transmission in today. I used the C223 mounts that Anthony gave me. They took some prying to get the holes to line up, but worked out. The less good news is there's no way the original transmission crossmember will work with the auto trans that this engine came with. The mounting point is 6 to 9 inches aft of the original point. (remember, this engine/transmission is out of a 94 and my Trooper is a 91, so more variations result) Currently I have the original crossmember mounted with a piece of plywood above it and the transmission pan resting on it. So, I'm going to have to have some mounting pads attatched to the frame where the crossmember that came with the setup sits. I figure I'll have something made that will attatch to the 'new' crossmember and bolt or weld those to the frame. Not a deal breaker, but a setback from what I was hoping. My ideal was no welding for the engine and transmission mounts. Better the transmission crossmember than the engine mounts in my book.

Another setback is with the setup I have, my brake lines run right through where the down pipe from the turbo would run. So, I'm going to have to bend new brake lines. Again, that differs from my ideal, but something that I can take care of without too much difficulty.

Lastly, it looks that this trasmission used an electric sender for the speedo, so I'm going to have to figure out a way to make my stock mechanical setup work with it, or find an electric speedo that will fit in the stock dash. There may be a simple answer in that maybe the electric sender can be pulled and a mechanical unit fit in it's place. I'll be tackling that one near the end of the list.

I've come to realize that I had under estimated the work involved with this project. I have a tendency of doing that. I knew there would be a lot, but there is turning out to be more than I had anticipated. Fortunately, from what I can see, it's just a lot of leg work and nothing I don't have the abilities to handle. Just that it'll probably be summer before I'm driving this thing instead of spring.

I suffered from target fixation and didn't break out the camera today, not a lot to document really. Though, I wish I had gotten a picture of the flex plate arrangement on it. I'm used to american V8's where the flex plate bolts to the crank, torque converter bolts to the flex plate. This setup has a flex plate mounted to the crank, a roughly 4 inch cast aluminum spacer deal bolted to that, another flex plate bolted to that and the torque converter bolts to the second flex plate. Seems odd to me, but I'm sure there is some good engineering behind it.

Anyway, that's my brain dump from the day of work. I'll get pictures of what I do for the crossmember as that will hopefully prove usefull to anyone doing this in the future.

Paul