After getting up at 6am working, and then leaving after work Friday night at 6pm, drove straight through to Montgomery, Alabama and picked the engine up at 7am. I left Montgomery at 8am and drove to Atlanta to meet up with the Georgia Fiero Club at a diner for lunch at 1:30 pm. After lunch made it somewhere south of Atlanta before crashing.... make that collapsing at around 6pm. After 24 hours on the road, straight through, other than food and gas stops, I was just beyond exhausted!

Got up at 8 am and am now just South of Daytona Beach. Only 4 or 5 hours to go!

Look what followed me home

[This message has been edited by JohnWPB (edited 03-30-2016).]

quote Originally posted by Neils88: ...you made my heart skip a beat...

Yikes! I didn't realize that, till I just re-read my post now! Poor choice of words!

I Just got back to my house about a half hour ago. What a LONG trip to go get an engine! 50 total hours, and a total mileage of 1578. The engine is still on the trailer, and is going to stay right there until tomorrow..... at this point, I do not care that the U-Haul trailer was supposed to be back this evening!

I am quite happy with everything now that I have it back home. For $900 I got the 3800SC Series III with around 60,000 miles on it. The northstar throttle body and the adapter plate, FieroFlyer wiring harness, and the ECM he programmed for this engine with A/C and Auto trans, Transmission mount, Smaller pulley and the pulley removal tool to change it out on the Super Charger, and some miscellaneous new sensors.

I can't wait to start stripping it down, replacing all the gaskets, water pump and other hardware, then cleaning, and painting it all up. I already bought a pint of Vista Blue, the same color my car was painted, for the valve covers and the super charger.

[This message has been edited by JohnWPB (edited 08-28-2016).]

quote Originally posted by tshark: What, not going to MAACO?

No.......

I had to go buy a 2 Ton engine hoist to get the damn engine off the trailer. Wow that thing is heavy with the transmission on it. I was able to get it under my carport, and even managed to get the transmission removed. For me this was a pretty big accomplishment, as I am NOT a mechanic, and have never tried to work on an engine like this before. Honestly, I could not figure it out completely on my own. I had all the bolts (or so I though) removed, and it still would not come loose. I Youtube'd "Removing a 3800 transmission" and learned of a hidden bolt that you need to remove the power steering pump to get to. Then, you need to assemble every extension you can find in your collection of tools, and reach way back in to get it out. Now I need to figure out where to get the bolts that are needed to mount the engine to the engine stand. The ones from the transmission are far too short, something I did not know until I just tried today.

Here is the engine on the base of the engine stand to roll it around for now:
(Photos to document what it looked like before I did anything to it)








I will get some more pictures during the daylight tomorrow of where it all stands now. I plan to document everything I can as reference for anyone else, with NO experience doing something like myself.

I just realized, my car is watching everything I do very closely

[This message has been edited by JohnWPB (edited 03-27-2016).]

This post is a combination of posts from another thread where I asked for advice on items. I copied it here to archive in my build thread

The mount for the coil packs, on the 3800 needs to be cut for the decklid to close properly. You need to retain the lower portion as it houses a tensioner as well as an idler pulley.

I took the engine mount / pulley assembly off:


I then went to 2 different machine shops. Neither said they had the equipment to cut it (I am thinking to myself you ARE a machine shop, correct?!) . The one shop has been in business since 1982 and has a long waiting list of months to get some stuff done there. Kinda crazy they can not cut a cast iron motor mount. Any suggestions on how to get this done?

Also the bearing in the idler pulley is SHOT, so it's good to dissemble everything and check it all out before putting it all back together.

[This message has been edited by JohnWPB (edited 03-12-2016).]