the oil pan finally showed up after over 3 months (quoted 2.5 wks back mid-January) so I am close to yanking the engine out and getting that swapped and the block drilled for the mini-starter. Sucks that it is the only pan I can find with a standard part number that has three evenly spaced outputs on the sump. The hold up now is waiting on Unisteer to send me the right parts - they sent the wrong ones a couple weeks ago, was supposed to send the right ones early this week, I called Friday to see if anything happened and of course nothing. And people wonder why someone who loves cars so much ran away from the automotive world as fast as I could when I got my engineering degree
Customers rarely believed me when I swore the screwed up lead times weren't my fault - they just assumed I dropped the ball. Anyway, old wounds open back up easy I guess. I want to have the engine in place next weekend when I have those parts (hopefully) and make sure I get the steering input I want without hitting any of the pulley items on the front of the engine.
I also bought some universal seat sliders from Summit and got those installed. The seats were sitting rather low in the car and I was going to quick fab up some spacers, but then just decided to go this route for much more adjustability. Racing series won't allow them but I decided I am not going to try to SCCA this car but just open track day it as I have for quite awhile now. W2W sounds like fun, and actually can be really fun, but I don't see the need to do it with this car at this point. If I change my mind, it is a matter of minutes to swap these out for spacers if I really feel the need. I also took a painstaking amount of time to notch the pedal box out to move the pedals further forward - all the gas pedal linkage was hitting otherwise - and then right when I finished and put the pedals back in I realized I could just move the linkage around and bypass all of that.
So I relo'd the linkage and it all fits quite nicely of course. Hey, at least it is right in the end I guess
Got the rockers mocked up in and verified the wheels will turn enough and not hit anything. All about squeezing it all in. It will be easier in the rear of the car as the tie rods are on the back side, not the front. I also made another adapter for the tie rod cross bar to put super long tie rods in and added even more adjustability to get best overall Ackermann once it is all together and testing on the track.