Finally went and bought me a brand new cherry picker and got some time to work on the truck.
I bought a bunch of grade 8 hardware mated the tranny to motor. Dropped the combo in place and centered
Clamped the transmission x-member in place and then lowered and engine till I got as close to my desired pinion angle.
Trimmed/cut my motor mount brackets slid in place and then double triple quadruple checked my clearances.
Tacked in brackets and took all out.

I am now posting my work to see if any one catches anything big that I did not think of or miss before I weld in the brackets.

Thanks again and lets hope I am ready to weld in move along.

My main concerns:
-Desired pinion angle was 3 down. But The best I could get was 3.75. I am thinking I can get that out of my four link though or using a tranny pad to lift a little. Not sure. concerned resolved through redoing motor mounts. 3 down achieved on the money
-I wonder if anything goes in between the tranny and engine. I am thinking it maybe a plate that covers the gear at the bottom that is exposed. resolved, block plate goes in between and I had it in

 

Hey SVT,
I can't recall what engine you are using there - but we just had our F1 come back from the transmission shop. We had 2 trans failures at a prior shop - turns out a "spacer plate" was missing from our build between our 351 & our AOD.

You might want to double check if your application requires a "spacer" in front of that AOD - just for piece of mind. Good luck over there.

Ben in Austin

 

Ben,
Thank you for the info, I am running a 302 in front of the AOD. There is a block plate that my transmission guy told me I needed and is on there but I am going to have to double check about the spacer.

Once I go for the long term install I will have him come and do any of the tweaking.

Thanks

 

I couldn't tell for sure in the picture, but it appeared you do have the block plate in place. That's the only 'spacer' you should need. If so, you're just missing the inspection cover plate to fill the hole at the bottom. That should be easy enough to find or build from scratch.

 

Merc Thanks, a lot for validating. Looks like I need that inspections plate. I had a feeling something covered the bottom of the tranny but was not sure.

As for the way the engine sits and spacing I have not heard anything negative. I will give it a day and then weld in and move on.

 

In the last picture, I keep on staring at the motor mount bracket placement. Before I tacked them in I noticed that the right was slightly more forward then the left. I gave a good once over and engine was leveled perfectly and pinion anlge was nice. Engine looked straight with the frame from the rear.

I am still wondering if that is normal (for the motor mount brackets to not be parallel with each other) or if I need to go at it again. Any thoughts?

 

I don't think engine angle is nearly as critical with FI engines as it is with carb, where you want the carb pad on the intake level for the floats to work correctly. That said, if you can shim the trans mount to help achieve a better angle, that would be a good thing. As long as your crank angle and pinion angle are parallel, both up and down, and left to right, you'll be fine. There's not a lot of room for error there. It's critical for driveshaft and u-joint vibration and wear, as I'm sure you know.

I've never noticed if there's a difference in position of engine mounts on the block,side to side, but it would be simple enough to measure, if that would put your mind at ease. But here is something to consider, and it's hard to see in your pics how you did it, but the rubber insulator for the motor mount is designed to have the weight of the engine on the rubber against the frame mount. This is very often overlooked by about all of the manufacturers of engine mount kits and they rely on the thru bolt to do all the work. It's job is supposed to be simply to hold the two pieces together. And if you ever look at an OEM engine mounting, you'll see what I mean. If you can work out a way to correctly mount your engine in that fashion, you may have a more long-term trouble-free installation.

 

Merc,
Great information, with the way I fabbed up my brackets the angles of the brackets almost sit on the rubber mounts. Not my intention just they way it ended up. I was actually going to cut the brackets so it would no longer hit the rubber mount. With the new information I learned (which make s a lot of sense) I am going to give the brackets one more go to and then if need be shim the bracket to get the rubber to sit on it.

Thank you again. Maybe another update next week.

 

So a couple of things,

I measured the right and left motor mount brackets in relation to the harmonic balancer and they are in fact about 1/3"" off set Right mount sitting forward slightly.

Either way since I was only tacked in place and I got a real good sense of how to do it my first time around… For peace of mind I cut out the brackets started over (measure many times and weld it once). Anyhow there is no more doubt in my mind.

I gave myself enough clearance where I was able to get good weld around the whole square brackets. Along with redoing everything I was able to achieve my pinion angle without having to adjust my four link

Pix coming soon of final placement

 

Here are the pics