Hurmeez

Yeah those stickers are pretty hardcore aye. Every single one we stuck on my old man's Escort pulled the original paint off down to the primer. Pit of a pisser really. Had great fun on the drive though! 

So I said it should be sweet. Was I fuckin right or what?!

I started by making each face of the new wing in separate pieces of steel and tacking them together. 

There was a time when I would have tried to fold it all out of one piece but it was much easier to do it this way. 

With it all tacked up, I snapped it off the pedal box and welded it fully. 

Then tacked it up again and welded it to the box properly. 

Then I marked and drilled the appropriate holes to mount up the master.  

The bottom bolt is a bit of a pig to get in and out because it ended up right on the wall of the original pedal box. Eventually, I think I'll swap it for the studs that the master originally had but shorten them a little and run a nut on the inside of the pedal box. Should make the whole situation a lot easier to mount. 

Finally, here is the pedal at clutch fully out, 

And fully in. 

Next I knocked together this little fella, 

And filled up the old clutch cable connection point. 

Their powers combined they make this: 

A neat little adjustable pedal stop with a rubber button from the original Mazda pedal. Much better than putting a nut and bolt through the floor like I've seen suggested on some pages online. 

With that, the pedal box modifications are finished (at least in the clutch department anyway). Now I just have to get on to mounting it. 

To start, I ground off the return on the doubler plate and clutch cable conduit where it would foul the new wing. 

Then I made an extension for the doubler plate and welded it on. 

Finally, I had to drill and cut the holes to allow the master cylinder to penetrate the firewall. It just so happened that the center of the main hole was inside the clutch conduit hole so a hole saw would have made a terrible mess wandering around everywhere trying to cut the hole. Instead, I bolted up the pedal box and used it as a template to make the two smaller bolt holes. Then I made a temporary support for the hole saw and bolted it to the bulkhead with the new holes. 

Which let me cut it out from the other side.  

I might weld up the oval parts of the original penetration but it works fine as it is for now. 

As tempted as I was to bolt the pedal box and master cylinder straight up, I figured I'd get a little more fab done in the area while I was here. So I made up this little guy, 

And tacked it in place on the firewall. I also threw the pedal box and master on while I was there, 

Before mounting this sweet piece of kit. 

It's a leftover from my old man's roadster when he mistakenly ordered the wrong kit for his braking system. I reckon it fits really nicely in there and I'll only need a short 90-degree elbow to connect it up. The whole thing came out looking kick ass and I'm really happy with the result. It's going to be fantastic when it's finished and running. I'm just leaving the mounting pedestal tacked on there for now until I find a brake master cylinder that will work in case I need to shift it to make it fit. 

That leads me to a request for help. What brake master cylinder should I use? Bearing in mind I plan to use princess four-piston calipers on the front and I'm not sure exactly what on the rear yet. I am going to use the R31 skyline diff that I have but I'm not sure what brakes to use on it. I don't have any for it yet and I'm looking at probable disks of some sort but I'm not sure which and I'm open to suggestions. I'm looking at a Datsun B310 master right now because it's the same bore as a standard Mk2 Escort master but it has the under and over mounting holes. I'll have to run a remote booster but that won't be an issue. My only concern is whether or not it would be compatible with disk brakes in the rear due to its internal residual pressure valve. I'm open to suggestions if you have any. Please let me know here: 

As far as I know you are allowed to weld the pad on just nothing on the arm itself. I think the idea is that if the pad breaks off you can still push on the arm somewhat, but if the whole arm snaps or bends then you and all 50 of your horsepowers go a screaming 30kmh up the ass of a particularly grumpy Kev at the lights in his lifted Colorado. 

Yeah I'm aware of the whole "no welding brake pedals" deal but I'm not too worried about the clutch pedal. I haven't even looked at the brake pedal yet. 

It did only end up taking a few hours but finding the few hours took a while. Never mind though. 

Started with the cardboard as per usual then moved on to the steel.  

As a bit of a side note, this is what happens when you use the wrong tip on the Rivnut gun without realising. 

After they were all done I welded them on and mounted the rad properly for the first time.  

It's solid as a rock now. I'm really happy with how it turned out. 

With that done, the front panels are almost all fabbed up. I still want to modify my original replacement radiator mount panels to tie the slam panel down a bit more solidly. I'll cut them somewhere along these lines and fold up a flange to give them a bit more strength then weld them between the inner wing and slam panel. 

I would have done them next but I wanted a break from the panel work and I've been wanting to have a go at the clutch system for a while now. So that's what I did. 

I bought a second-hand clutch pedal assembly from a wrecked RX-8 with the plan of essentially replicating it with the standard Escort pedal. This is the Mazda pedal on the left and the Escort on the right. 

You can see that with the pivot points in similar positions the pedals are actually fairly similar in length and shape. You can also see the pushrod, clevice, and pin that the Mazda uses to activate the master cylinder. This is somewhat different to the cable that the Escort uses but I think I can make something work. I started by assembling this assortment of bits: 

Which come together to make this: 

I fully welded the bracket and turned up a quick bronze bushing to take the clevis pin. 

It comes in handy having a bunch of Grandad's old boat building bolt stock around sometimes. This should last much better than the crappy plastic bush that was in the original Mazda pedal and remove a lot of the slop that was present. 

Then I welded everything together and cleaned it up.    

You can also just barely see the bush that I tapped in there. 

Finally, I assembled everything and had a look at how it was going to turn out.   

It turned out mint actually. I'm fizzing about how well I managed to pull it off. 

I threw the pedal back onto the box and mocked up the master cylinder in about the spot it looked like it wanted to be. It turned out that it would end up about 20mm further from the pedal than it would have in the Mazda so I extended the pushrod by 20mm. The rod I used was a little larger diameter than the original but it works fine.

This is at full engagement: 

And full disengagement: 

I made a cardboard template for an extension to the pedal box that would mount the master cylinder  

You can see how close it's going to end up to the brake tower mounts. This won't be an issue though because the brake tower won't fit anyway. With the exhaust system and the radiator set further back than factory, it never stood a chance. My plan right now is to find a brake master cylinder that has essentially the same internals but has under and over mounting bolts. That way there'll be shitloads of clearance between the two. Then I'll put a remote booster under the dash or inside the inner wing or something. 

The plan for tomorrow is to turn the template into steel and start modifying the firewall to take the new pedal box layout. Should be sweet. 

After having a proper look at the rad I was starting to worry that maybe it would turn out to be too big and I was starting to consider a chin spoiler to cover up the rad poking through the front valence. I started pricing one up and found that it would be $250 for a brand new fiberglass repro or the same for a slightly sad original rubber one. Then I thought, why spend $250 to fit a $65 part when I could find a rad that fits more easily for another $65 and spend less than half the money even with the wasted radiator. Before I wrote it off though, I checked the fit one more time and with a bit more fiddling I saw that I'd be able to make it work. It'd be tight, but it would work. 

So I set to and made a CAD template.  

This shows just how tight I have to make it with the cutout to get around the bottom hose inlet. 

Then I transferred the template to steel and started forming everything. I opted to use 2mm plate for doubler plates for the captive nuts behind the ARB mount brackets.  

Ultimately I probably should have just welded the corners and done a few stitches because the warping that I got was a bit more than I would have liked, even with moving the heat around and not letting any one area getting too hot. 

Then it was the captive nuts.  

Then I had to try to fold it without using the brake because it was too long. In hindsight, I should have made it in two pieces and welded it in the middle but I didn't think of that at the time. 

I made it work in the end anyway. 

The first mockup went pretty well. It fits in the gap anyway. 

Next, I had to make the cutout for the bottom hose. Holesaw: 

Grinder: 

Paper: 

Steel: 

Somewhere along the line someone messed up a measurement and the inlet was touching on the cutout so I smeared some neverseez around to act as a transfer medium to tell me where it was touching.  

It ended up being a fairly drastic adjustment with the bottom of the cutout moving down about 10mm before I was done. Unfortunately, I was head down bum up determined to make it work so I didn't take any photos but rest assured I made it fit. 

I also made up some pieces to locates the factory rubber mounts after modifying them to be far lower profile. 

I wasn't completely happy with the clearance between the cross member and the rad. It would probably end up with the core touching once it was properly mounted and that wasn't something I was going to be ok with. I sat and thought and tried to figure something out but ultimately I had to slice along the length of the top and narrow it by 5mm. 

The result left me much happier with the gap. 

There's approximately 10mm clearance at the closest point between the core and the cross member now. 

With that pretty well sorted, I had a look at the brace that would have run vertically between the slam panel and the original radiator support panel. To my surprise, there was actually a good amount of room to work with. 

I was planning on modifying this piece to just come forward and weld to the valence. Now though, I realised I could put another cross brace between the inner wings to make up for the panel I took out. So, cardboard: 

(I reused the template from before, hence the cutout)

And then steel: 

With that done, the next job would be to make the top mounts for the rad. To do that though I'd need to put together my nice new slam panel to have something to build to.  

And that's where I got up to. It shouldn't take long to make up some small upstands to pick up the original rubber mounts so I'll try to get that done tomorrow. 

As far as my rear suspension idea goes, I found out why I haven't really seen it used anywhere else, despite how simple it looks to me. It turns out there are some dynamic aspects that I hadn't considered, all explained extremely well by this website: http://www.trucktrend.com/how-to/chassis-suspension/0804st-rear-suspension-design/

I'll save you the whole read and paste the part relevant to me. 

Quote

Full Reverse and two-Forward/two-Reverse Link Systems
If all you're looking for is simplicity of installation and you don't want a two-link, these systems are the ticket. We have all seen them at shows or on the road (you might even own one!), so we can't argue that they don't work. The best explanation that we've been able to come up with for these systems is that they are counterproductive. The suspension's job is to take energy that is being transferred into the tires from the ground and to properly transmit those forces into the chassis to be used to create more traction. A reverse link system, in which the bars mount to the rear axle and the rear of the chassis behind it, does just the opposite, and the two-forward/two-reverse link system is nearly unpredictable in how it transfers energy from the ground to the chassis.

Even if you calculate every single point to an exact placement when designing one of these systems for your truck, you will still only end up with a driveable truck and not one that handles properly. Your only hope for performance with a reverse triangulated four-link is to limit the travel as much as possible and run a stiff spring and a stiff shock. Then, maybe you'll have the traction of a poorly set-up forward-facing link system. The best way to think about it is to understand that with a properly designed forward-link system the rearend is actually being pushed against the ground by the chassis. So any force that the rear end can use to push against the chassis will ultimately create more traction. With a reverse-link system, if the rear end were to pull down on the chassis there would be an equal loss of traction. Try this on a bathroom scale. Stand on the scale in front of a cabinet and pull up on the cabinet and see that your weight goes up according to how much force you are able to apply to the cabinet. Now push down on the cabinet. Your weight will go down to nothing fairly easily. That is what's happening on a reverse-link system. The rotating force of the tires driving the truck forward applies an opposite twisting force into the rear end housing, and that force is applied to the chassis behind the rear end pulling the back of the chassis down, thus negating any hope for traction.

On paper, this design looks great because the pinion can be kept well within working limits. A quite desirable instant center can be calculated, and it seems to fit into the confines of just about any truck. The real negative effects are all dynamic, meaning that they are only noticeable when the truck is being driven and the more dynamics being applied, the less traction it has.

I see what you mean. My setup would basically be the same as yours other than having two top bars rather than your single one. Regarding the Watt's link versus the Panhard bar, we learned it physics at school last year that when you're describing an arc of 10 degrees or less then the line is so close to it that it can be mathematically considered a straight line. If the Panhard rod is 700mm, which would be about right for the axle width, with a 125mm suspension travel, which would be about what I'm looking at, then using some trigonometry I can work out that the arc described by the Panhard would be 10.2 degrees. That also means the total deflection of the axle will be 3mm maximum over the whole travel. Ultimately there is far more than 3mm of deflection in the sidewall of the tires during heavy cornering so I think that the added complication of the Watt's link over the Panhard isn't actually worth the relatively minute amount of deflection it might avoid, so if I do go down the four-link route I think the Panhard bar is the best option. It makes sense in an application with more travel, like in a lifted 4WD, to use the Watt's link because the deflection would increase an awful lot, but I don't think the relatively small travel of a lowered road car like mine warrants it. All that said though I might have completely missed something so feel free to correct anything I might have cocked up.

It's just printer paper so I'm not too worried

I made a trip to the wreckers for a browse, looking for a center section for my diff and other miscellaneous stuff and took a tape measure with me. Using that I managed to find this: 

This just so happens to be the largest radiator I could possibly fit.   

It has about 5mm clearance on either inner wing. As you can see I'll need to completely re-engineer the radiator support/anti-roll bar mount cross member and the side panels, and the radiator hose will have to do a couple of tight turns to get around the anti-roll bar as well but other than that it's pretty much perfect. It has no radiator cap in the top tank, just like the original rad out of the Mazda, the bottom inlet is on the correct side, it is thicker than the original Mazda and compared to the original Escort rad, 

It probably has twice the effective area. So the combination of size and the modern design means that with a couple of fans there should be no way in hell that I'll overheat it at all. I would be absolutely astounded if anyone is able to tell me what it came out of. In fact, I would bet money that you couldn't guess. 

Additionally, I've been knocking some suspension ideas around in my head. Being young and dumb and full of the proverbial, I know there'll be the occasion where I want to make a speedy exit of an intersection or leave a traffic light hard or something. I've seen people try this on leaf springs and the axle tramp that results is often quite embarrassing. Now I'm no stranger to embarrassment but I do prefer to avoid it if possible, along with the hammering that the axles get when the occasion arises. So ideally to avoid this I'd need a four-link of some description. Yes, I'm aware that anti tramp bars exist but from what I've seen and read, they're not really that effective and the effort to go from installing them versus a full four-link isn't a huge leap. But then my annoying requirements come in and complicating everything. 

I really like the idea of the car looking fairly bog standard from the outside and retaining as much factory functionality as possible without sacrificing any for the upgrades. Specifically, in this case, the folding rear seat. In Escort estates, as with most station wagons, the rear seat lifts the base up and forward and lays the back down in its place to form a larger cargo area. If I was to use standard four-link boxes they would end up in the same place at the seat base. Even if I used the earlier style with shorter arms, they would still intrude too far into the cabin to allow the standard rear seat functionality and so according to my requirements, they're out too. 

For a while, I was stumped. Then I thought, why not use the raised rear floor to my advantage? Who says I can't send the top arm backward instead of forward? So I made a quick little scale mockup to see if it could work. 

I end up with about 75mm bump and 50mm droop with very minimal axle deflection at either extreme of travel. This being so small scale it's difficult to rely on the accuracy but I ran the numbers through my old physics workbooks from last year and the Watt's link type off effect shouldn't cause the axle to twist significantly over this sort of travel distance so the driveshaft angles shouldn't be a factor to worry about.

This GIF shows a mock-up driveshaft to illustrate this. 

I'd probably use standard style turrets set back far enough to not affect the latching mechanism of the seat and a typical Panhard rod or Watt's link for the lateral location. This is all just ideas at the moment. I'm interested in your guy's opinions. Let me know what you think here: 

Yeah love the turbos! They're such a neat old mag and yet I've seen more on trailers around town than cars! 

I was originally looking at a Link but seeing as I'm looking at being a poverty-stricken student next year I'm starting to like the sound of a Megasquirt more and more. I'm sure you'll be one of the first to know whichever way I decide to go though. 

I've been thinking about a double plenum double throttle body setup made up of two stock manifolds cut down and modified to curve off outwards over each valve cover. I think that might be an interesting idea but ultimately I'll probably be more likely to do something more similar to your setup to begin with. I also really like this sort of setup http://www.absurdflow.com/miata/klde/newintake13.JPG but I might be over complicating everything for myself. 

It's funny you mention the 16mm flywheel spacer because that's actually about the same as mine. I didn't realise that was a lot really. I just figured I gotta do what I gotta do. I suppose the other option would be to machine down the mounting face of the gearbox but that's starting to sound expensive. 

I hope you're enjoying the heat over there at the moment. We've been getting some chilly mornings over here on the opposite side of the planet so I'm pretty jealous. 

Sell you one? Don't be stupid! 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Hrmsd2swrdFrLON0P7ciTptTi4wF2z1I/view?usp=sharing

That's the final drawing I came up with, including modifications I found it needed from fitting mine up. It now has a cutout to clear the thermostat housing as well as a couple of other cosmetic things. You'll still have to machine your own locating lugs and the flywheel will be an obstacle that I'll show how I overcome soon, but the bulk of the work is done with this file. Finally you'll need some countersunk screws to replace the thermostat housing bolts and you'll have to bore out the holes with an appropriate countersink bit to match the screws. That means you can leave it in the stock location and still clear the gearbox. 

Everything that follows is just to try and make this show up in a google search for someone looking for this kind of thing.

mazda KLZE KLDE RX-8 adapter plate K8 KF KJ KL V6 bellhousing rx8 

Thanks Alex! Mean's a lot coming from the guy that made me want to do mine in the first place. 

Thanks mate. I'm gonna mount the actual engine and throw her down on her feet this weekend for a proper look. I can't wait 

Before I got to cutting up my cross member, I wanted to remedy the bolt holes for the lower control arms. They had been welded up and re-drilled what looked like a couple of times; one side actually had two holes for some reason. My first course of action was to weld up the current holes so I had a solid base to start from. 

While I was there, I fully seam welded the upstand to the main cross member to add strength. 

Then I took a template off another unmodified cross member to find the location of the factory LCA bolt hole before moving it up and out by 6mm as per the bible: 

(Available here if you're interested: http://www.doublegmotorsport.com/rsprep/prepindex.html) 

Then I marked it on a group of four 2mm reinforcing plates and pilot drilled them all. Then I filled them full of holes, painted all the hidden parts with weld through primer to try and prevent rusting between the skins, then prepared to roset weld them on. 

I figured that there's no harm in beefing up these parts of the suspension so I might as well while I'm here. 

Once they were welded on I decided to weld around the edges too while I was at it. 

Now I could run a drill through the pilot holes and bingo, one cross member with reinforced LCA mounts and slightly more camber.

As a side note, the geometry doesn't make sense to me. In the book, it says that moving the holes out and up gives more negative camber when the car is raised for rallying. Surely the opposite should be true? If you are raising the cross member relative to the wheel then wouldn't you want to lower the LCA back down to compensate rather than raise it as in this example? And by extension lowering the car means you should raise the hole as I have here? Am I missing something? 

The next job was to cut off the existing engine mount brackets. I decided it was going to be much easier to fabricate new designs than to try to adapt the current ones to fit. 

One Escort cross member minus engine mounts. 

And cleaned up:  

Now I wanted to plate over between the two flanges to give myself a good solid base to build off.

This was the normal process of paper to 2mm steel.   

I only welded every other hole with the idea that I'd weld the new mounts right through this plate and into the existing flange in a triple layer sandwich.

I decided the easiest way to figure out how the mounts would end up looking will be to build them from the engine side first, and then up from the cross member to meet them. So I started with making some plates to fit the engine with paper then steel.     

I left this one oversize because there will be some fouling issues with the oil filter if I don't play my cards right, so I am playing it safe for now and leaving myself plenty of wiggle room. 

Then I spun up some appropriately heavy wall tubing and some temporary bushes to use so I don't damage the real ones while I'm welding. 

They're designed to take MKII Escort rear leaf spring bushes. This is for two reasons. Firstly, I prefer this style of engine mount because even if the bush completely collapses, the engine is still captive (albeit loose and clunky as hell), unlike a spool mount which (though very unlikely) could lead to catastrophic failure. And secondly, I have some of these specific bushes hanging out almost brand new from when the wrong set of bushes were replaced on a WOF job on the old man's car. So they're the best kind of cheap.  

Next job will be to make some upstands to space these new mounts out from the block. That shouldn't take long...

Well, tell a lie actually. First I wanted to sort out the centering of the gear stick in the gearbox hole. 

I'm not sure how I managed to get it so far rearward but I wanted to center it properly because A) it bugged me being off center like that and 2) it actually placed the engine a little further rearward than I wanted. So I modified the cross member to make it work. 

So now it's much better.

The camera angle makes it look funky but trust me it's much better. 

Now it's on to the engine mounts. 

I spoke to my regular bolt suppliers (a fantastic bunch of really genuine guys) and they were unable to get me the countersunk bolts that I needed but they did point me toward a few shops that may be able to help. So after doing a bit of running around there turned out to be no one local that would be able to sort me out. So I came up with a cunning plan. I went back to the regular guys and picked up some countersunk 12mm bolts that were way over length and god knows what pitch. Then I chucked it up and spun down the threads to be a very close fit to the inside diameter of an M12x1.25 die. Having it be a close fit helped to ensure the threads would be nice and square to the shank as I cut them. Once cut, I cut them to length and bob's your uncle. 

So from left to right you have, an original bolt, without threads, thread cut, and cut to length. 

And here they are mocked up in the plate. 

Then I went ahead and set to with my shiny new countersink. Everything went fairly well other than the drill press not being able to go as slow as I'd like and getting a little chatter but other than that not bad. One of the inserts I made to go over the 10 o'clock locating lug fell out when I drilled through the weld with the countersink. 

I was sort of expecting it and I don't reckon it'd be worth the effort to try to make such a small piece of steel fit so I'm just going to run without it. There's still plenty of contact patch for the bolt to take up on so I'm perfectly happy with it. 

With that done I could finally, finally bolt engine to gearbox and sling it into the car properly.  

Remember I first got the engine and gearbox in September of last year so this feels like the end of a project in and of itself. 

Next job, onto engine mounts. 

I got completely carried away and didn't realise how late it had gotten. I got to the point where I had to sling the engine and box back in so I stuck a measuring stick in there to satisfy my (and probably your) curiosity. Dropping everything as low as I think I can get away with has gotten me a gap of 30mm between the bottom of the block and the steering rack which is the closest point. It's also given me at least 160mm everywhere above the intake ports to make an intake manifold. There are places with more but that's the minimum height. 

@Transom I think I have roughly 100-120mm for an intake but I've taken the engine back out of the car to make the mounts so I can't give an exact number. @yoeddynz I think I left about 50mm between the sump sealing face of the block and the cross member. Again, can't give an exact number until I throw it all back in again. I haven't looked at it with the steering rack in yet so I'll have to check that before I make any proper mounts. I'm planning on keeping the engine front sumped at the moment but I'm worried about oil at the back not making its way forward to the pickup properly if I mount it too low to put a decent back to front slope in the sump. Sorry for a bit of a non-answer to both of you but I'll try to get you some hard numbers soon.

Aaand we're back. 

After I finished welding in the dowels I drilled them out with a tapping drill before cutting a thread in each. You can really see how off center the holes are from these photos.  

With that done I moved on to making the flywheel spacer. I wanted to get this out of the way fairly early on because it was the thing that would tell me whether or not the plate was going to work. Up until now, I knew that the plate fitted the engine and gearbox separately but I still wasn't sure whether or not the input shaft and spigot bearing would line up correctly when the two were combined. Once I had the spacer in there though, the input shaft would be able to slide all the way home in the spigot bearing and I'd be able to tell if there was any side loading on the input shaft.

So that's what I did. 

I did the maths with my notebook to figure out exactly how much spacing I need, which turned out to be 16.3mm, in order to get the ring gear and starter motor to line up nicely. 

The spacer slips snugly over the end of the crank and into the flywheel. I have some longer high tensile flywheel bolts on order to take up the longer distance so I should be able to assemble it once they arrive. I dummy fitted everything without the bolts though and everything lined up really nicely. With the knowledge that it was finally going to work, I could press on and make up the last few turned pieces to complete the plate. 

These were the plugs for the engine side locating dowel holes. I need to put a countersunk bolt in one and a normal hex headed bolt from the back on the other, so I needed to make up some partial plugs to reduce the diameter of the ends of these holes. This being the threaded one that takes the bolt from the back side, 

And this being the plug that will be countersunk later on. 

Both were made slightly oversize and pressed and welded in, as per the previous ones. 

With those all complete, the only thing I have left to do is countersink the appropriate holes and bolt it all up. However, I had to special order the countersunk bolts and bit and they aren't arriving for a couple of days so I decided to see if I could make it work with the bolts that I do have. Here it is bolted to the block with the couple of bolts that come in from the back side,

And here it is with the gearbox bolted in place.

So I gently eased the whole assembly down to horizontal and found that the few bolts that were in it were ample to hold everything without any flexing of the plate. So, naturally, I slung it into place. 

It sure looks sweet nestled down in there. 

Just to double check, I threw the heads and bonnet on to check clearances.  

There's a good 20mm at the closest point so I'm happy for now. We'll have to see when it comes to making an intake manifold but I'm sure I can make something fit within the space I will have. 

The extremely astute among you may have noticed the engine doesn't look perfectly level left to right. That was my cunning solution to the problem I encountered way back in this issue: 

 There was going to be a couple of mounting holes that would overlap slightly but not perfectly, in a way that meant I'd be trying to wind the thread of one bolt into part of the head of another. I ummed and ahhed over this issue for a while, coming up with all sorts of fantastically complicated solutions, until I realised the answer was staring me in the face. Just rotate the engine and gearbox relative to each other by about 5 degrees. Then I would offset the gearbox mount by 2.5 degrees one way and the engine mounts the same the other way and viola! Problem solved. There's nothing wrong with having either on a slight lean, just ask any skyline owner. 

With that all sorted and while I'm waiting for my bolts to arrive, I'll make a start on some engine mounts and get that part of the deal started. 

I don't have long left on these long hour work days so hopefully I'll be able to put some more quality time in on the car before long. I can't wait.