Installing the Miata Engine.

Today I installed the flywheel and clutch and dropped the engine in the car. But first...

Here's my method for getting seals out. First I drill a small hole in the middle of the seal. The top of the seal is metal underneath the rubber so it's quite hard.

Then I screw a screw into the hole, being careful not to drive it too deep. It just needs to thread in a couple turns.

Then grab the screw with pliers or vise-grips and pull.

Viola! This one was really easy. Smaller seals like the cam seals can be more stubborn and sometimes you have to put in two screws so you can pull from two sides.

Here's the F1 Racing chromoly flywheel just before being bolted down. It weighs about 11 pounds so should be a nice performance enhancer.

The holes for the pressure plate bolts were threaded wrong! The factory bolts are M8x1.0 while the flywheel is threaded for M8x1.25. Of course they don't tell you that so when I started to bolt on the pressure plate I was met with resistance. I got all six screws about halfway in before I decided something was not right and pulled them out. I went to the hardware store and bought new bolts.

I was going to plan a tech day with some friends to help me install the engine, but my time has been so limited lately I had to just forge ahead whenever I could and ended up doing it by myself. Flying the engine on the crane into the engine bay was not too hard. It just took me about 15 minutes to maneuver it into place. I wasn't able to finish bolting up the transmission due to a complication. Usually the engine and transmission will mate up and go together pretty easily. Sometimes they fight a little bit but with some finessing, they will eventually pop together and from there it's easy to bolt them down. Today though they never got friendly with each other. I got the bellhousing bolts about halfway in and was met with extreme resistance. The transmission and engine are still a good 3/4 of an inch apart and the bolts just don't want to go any farther. I'm afraid I'm going to bend the transmission input shaft so I desisted for today and will start over next weekend. Something isn't mating up right and I'm not sure why. I've seen this before, though, and I'm confident I can sort it out next weekend.

I'm glad it's back in its place!

All put up for the night.