Hey folks, I spent about a couple or three hours putting the motor back in the car and re-connecting everything and, damn, this motor is hot.

Check ‘dis.

Yep. A Cobra motor now. How about that? One of the biggest differences between the old motor configuration and this one is that the upper intake does not need a EGR spacer. I had the heater hose’s barb that supplied hot coolant to pass through the EGR spacer TIG welded shut. The EGR basically goes straight onto the upper intake component. I just needed to put the 70mm BBK throttle body that I already have on. Surprisingly, the intake diameter on the upper intake is also 70mm.

Enjoy. The next post will have a video of the engine start-up.

Hey guys, time to build the motor up!

The heads valves. Those valves are huge. You can see the intake

Make sure that you have the cylinder head on the block cleaned. Get that gunk off from the old head gasket. I used some green scrubbing loofah that you use to scrub dishes with. Especially the dishes/pans that have teflon and are sensitive to coarse abrasives like steel wool or that sort of thing. We don’t want to mess up that surface and jeopardize the head gasket’s seal.

I changed out the lifters by taking the “spyder” or “spider” hold down that holds the “dog-bones” in place. Those “dog-bones” are what holds the lifters from rotating. In this picture, you’ll see them better.

Got the head gasket on.

I went ahead and got the heads on. This motor is already starting to look pretty dang sexy.

My gosh, look at the size of those intake ports. Imagine… Oh yeah, I got the new chrome-moly pushrods from TrickFlow put in as well.

I got the first set of roller rockers put on.

Got the rest of them on.

I started placing the seals and the intake gaskets in place and got the lower intake put on. I did a perfect red-RTV seal on this thing.

Here’s how the motor looks now.

Ah… beer time. So fun.

Ok, now I’ve taken the front subframe out of the car with the headers, transmission all connected. Man, this was so much easier than any of the conventional methods used to plop in the motor or having to use some garage with lifts. The best part of it is that you can do it by yourself, without the need of somebody else helping you out.

Here are some of the pictures as I started taking apart my engine.

Thats it for now.

A few comments…
The engine tear-down was very simple and straightforward. It was extremely easy to do. I would say, that for you fellow builders, if you have an 8 year old, make sure they’re a part of this process because this process is very easy for them to do. The only exception is that the heads are about 50-ish pounds, each. Yeah. Taking off about 100 pounds of cast iron off this motor is significant. Don’t be surprised on the spill out of coolant and a little oil as you pull the heads off.