I  spent a little time today thinking about how I'm going to mount/enclose the coils packs since I won't be mounting them to the engine.

Disassembled from the coil mounting bracket.  I also stripped all the electric tape off of the harness as I'll be needing to rebuild it.  Should serve as good practice on a smaller scale for the eventual cleanup/reconstruction of the engine harness.

How I'm thinking of mounting them.  Should give me the most straight forward/compact mounting that I can think of at the moment - a 7" x 3.75"x 4" sheet metal box should be big enough.  The only concern here is that the coils are now pretty close to each other and also close to what would be the floor of the box, so arcing becomes a legitimate concern.  I will likely spray them with some electrical varnish / epoxy to properly insulate them and have the sheet metal powdercoated to mitigate the risk.

Just a shot to show the potential for space savings as compared to the stock bracket.  I don't know how much room I 'm going to have left over after the engine's in, particularly on the driver's side. 

So far this week I've been working on getting the valve covers ready for filler/paint.  Because the coil packs and the plastic covers that go over them look like hell on top of the engine, I've decided to remote mount them and shave the mounting bosses for them on the valve covers.  That way the covers would be exposed, giving it more of a clean look on top.  Coil relocation kits and custom valve covers seem like really dumb things to spend money on so I'll be doing my own work.

Before:

After Shaving:

I ran out of metal blades for my dremel so had to use a hack saw to cut all of these fuckers off.

Bosses ground down flush and filled with plastic metal - well as flush as I could with a fucking angle grinder.  I also took a small carbide tip to clean out the accent stripes in the middle of the cover.  I'm gonna try to find a conical stone that will fit the profile, the tip of the carbide cutter wanted to walk all over the place, making it difficult to keep it uniform.

Starting to sand the casting surface:

Getting there.  It's going to need some more filler to get the boss holes flush as the plastic metal shrunk a bit after it cured.  There's some waves in the top surface from the casting also.  But once I get the casting texture off, I'll apply filler and primer.  Then it's getting Wrinkle black to match the intake manifold.  The accent lines and ring surrounding the mounting screws will be painted a bright silver to add some contrast.

Made a bit more progress over this past weekend.  Picked up an engine stand and got the motor mounted up to it, removed the intake manifold and painted it, and also cleaned up the intake ports / sealing surfaces on the intake side of the heads.

Cleaned up intake ports / sealing surfaces after removing the intake manifold.  I'll clean it more thoroughly once I remove the heads to replace the lifters/trays but this will suffice for now. 

Backside of one of the intake valves.  They all looked like this - pretty clean.

Getting ready to lift the engine to install on the engine stand.

Mounted up.  Now I'll have 360 access to everything on the engine.  Had to upgrade the handle to a long ass piece of pipe because there's no bearings to provide for easy rotation - I have to fight the friction generated by the weight of the engine.

With the engine mounted up now I started prepping the intake manifold for paint.  Removed fuel rails and injectors:

Then I sanded the manifold down with #220 grit to give the paint something to stick to. 

Paint!  VHT High Temp Wrinkle Black

Starting to dry:

I applied three coats of paint in varying directions, waited about 20 minutes, then used a heat gun to tighten up the microstructure of the textured finish.  You can see the difference between the textures below:

Before heat gun:

After heat gun:

Finished:

And a teaser shot of it on the engine.  The valve covers will be painted to match it.

Overall I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  Stock-ish appearance, just dressed up a bit.  Next time I won't wait as long to start going over it with a heat gun, I think the sun took away some of my working time and some spots having a tighter texture than others. 

Did a little more work on the starter tonight.  I was able to get the small e-torx bolts out that fasten the solenoid to the starter housing, had to cut the head off of one and pound two around with a hammer and punch to do it.  I'll be replacing them with stainless socket head cap screws to allow for easier access with an allen key.

The result:

I plan on prepping the stator can, end cap, solenoid heat shield, solenoid, and starter housing for paint, probably some type of silver / wrinkle black combo.  The internals will be just be cleaned up and will be repacked with fresh grease. 

I spent some time tonight after work gathering up a few supplies and cleaning up some stuff - a new light over the work bench, some wires wheels for the drill, and some degreaser for electrical components.

Rear of the block before:

Rear of the block after:

Cleaned up some of the alternator mount before I got tired of sanding/wire-wheeling:

Starter before:

Starter after:

And because I was bored, I decided to take the starter apart and figure out how I could disassemble things in the event that I wanted to paint the case.  Wasn't able to remove the solenoid to allow for complete disassembly but I was close.

Above is the rotor and exciter for the starter motor.  Juice is provided to the rotor, a magnetic field is induced in the coils, and it starts to spin to try to match itself up with the opposite pole in the stator. 

The rotor then drives these planetary gears, which then drives the gear that actually interfaces with the ring gear on the flywheel.  I never thought I'd see this again outside of MEMS 1029.  The solenoid must also somehow engage/disengage the starter gear from the flywheel gear, not sure exactly how yet because I couldn't get the solenoid off.  Tiny etorx heads that I did not have the patience for tonight. 

Also took the plastic cover off of the alternator and looked at it.

That's all for now.

Some serious progress in the past week.  The UPS man dropped this off for me last Tuesday, here are some initial pictures:

The engine came complete with the transmission, harness, driveshaft, headers, all accesssories, torque arm, pedal assembly, and the PCM.  Overall I was pretty impressed with how clean everything was.  Lots of the stuff I'll be able to sell off as I won't need it.  In person, you gain an appreciation for how big this thing is, even though it is a small block.  Definitely going to be a challenge to find the sweet spot in the engine bay for mounting.

In preparation for some reliability mods that I'll be doing, I started tearing down the motor, taking off the harness and some of the accessories.  I removed the coil packs, motor mounts, headers, AIR plumbing, AC compressor, and the power steering in order to give me access to lifting points on the heads.

I tried to label all of the connectors as I was taking it off the motor so I'll have an idea of what I need/don't need when I'm splicing harnesses together later on.

I noticed that the A/C idler and tensioner pulleys felt a bit rough, so I popped the bearing seals off, degreased them, and repacked them with some Redline CV-2 grease.  Small simple shit like this saves you a couple bucks.

I popped the valve covers off and also checked the spark plugs for any abnormal coloration.  Everything turned out okay there, and the rocker arms looked clean - which suggests that the PO kept up with oil changes.

Pretty much all stripped down.

I wanted to get a look at the clutch, so the next step was to get the transmission apart from the engine.  But from how it was sitting on the crate, there was no way in hell to do this without putting a decent bit of the load on an unsupported input shaft.  I didn't want to chance it, so I picked up an engine hoist from Harbor Freight.  I was able to score a deal on the 2-ton capacity model.  I also picked up a 1500 lb-capacity load leveler which will help to finesse driveline angles upon removal/installation, as well as balance everything.

All together.

Overall I'm pretty pleased with the construction.  I know it's Chinese made but you really can't beat the price.  I had a bit of trouble initially get the bottle jack to support a load - my first lift attempts would retract the ram.  After bleeding it and tightening up the release valve with pliers it worked fine.

Starting to get packed in the garage!  Not that I have much room to begin with - shit everywhere and it's only going to get worse.

As I mentioned, I had to remove the power steering to get to the lift point on the front of the driver's side head.  Kind of tricky without removing the pulley, but it can be done.

I was able to get my pick points, lift up the motor/trans from the crate, unbolt the trans from the bell housing, then block it up level and wiggle it free slowly.  Getting ready to lift:

The result:

With the clutch assembly exposed now it was quick work taking everything off the engine.  I braced a breaker bar against the pallet to keep the crank from spinning as I broke the bolts loose.  Here's some detail of the pressure plate / flywheel:

And for gigs, a comparison of the stock LS1 clutch against my OE 325i clutch that I pulled off this past spring:

In case you were wondering, the joke is on the right.

Upon initial inspection, there's some pretty serious heat marking and gouges in both the pressure plate and flywheel.  Either the PO didn't know how to drive or they flogged the shit out of this car.  I was hoping to be able to sell this off but I'm not sure I'll be able to do so without getting them resurfaced.  Oh well.  I'll be needing a new clutch kit regardless - considering an LS7 assembly or an aftermarket equivalent.

Everything stripped from the engine, except for the pilot bearing which I'll need to replace.  I will more than likely do the rear main seal while I'm in here.

With the transmission separated now, I decided to move the engine onto the cart I built and cut up the majority of the pallet to free up some floor space.  It's at a premium in my garage.

All stabbed up.  It's surprisingly stable - I'm pretty confident that it won't be going anywhere when moving the cart, though it's still probably a 2-man operation to move it to be on the safe side.

I did save a bit of the pallet to set the transmission on, and used some scrap to prevent it from rolling around.  The rest of it was burned in celebration of Al Gore's birthday.

A picture of the starter motor and solenoid, pretty filthy:

I also took some measurement for the AC compressor mount - I am likely going to need to fabricate something to bring the compressor in closer to the engine to give me some more clearance at my frame rails.

It looks as though I've got about 2.5" to play with, though if I gain an inch and change back that would be extremely helpful.  You can see from this angle how the compressor really sticks out there.

I had a bit of luck - the same week I bought the engine, I was able to find a custom made driveshaft from a guy that did the same swap I am doing.  He wrecked his car and no longer needed it, so I picked it up and ended up saving myself a good bit of change in the process.

Here you can see the original shaft (aluminum) is a bit shorter than than what I needed.

This shaft is 2.75" steel with 3110 rebuildable u-joints.  It has a t56 spline and a JTR flange for connecting to the 4-bolt flange on a 188 mm BMW diff.  Exactly what I needed.

Over the past couple nights I started messing with the wiring harness too.  After looking at it more closely, I'm pretty sure a 5 year old could have done a neater job wrapping this harness up.  Corrugated black tubing with a shit ton of electrical tape under it.  I stripped everything down to allow me to delete unnecessary wires from the harness, and then I plan on heat shrinking everything when it's done.

For the time being, I guess I better figure out what goes to what.

And here's the big pile of smelly, black plastic bull shit.  Seriously, it smells like shit.

And I made another friend :D

That's it for now, more to come soon.