I’ve slowly been making progress, mainly working on replacing the spider hose with some silicone hose and repairing a damaged downpipe.  The first length of hose that I purchased was a little bit large, so there was a delay in getting a better fitting hose, then I decided I wanted to use the Oetiker clamps and that required purchasing a few more.  When it came to the downpipe I brought it to a local exhaust specialist but they didn’t think there was anything they could do with it.  Luckily the shop that I have my car serviced at, HB Motorwerks, also does some fabrication and they didn’t think there’d be any problem repairing the downpipe.  They did say it would be best to be able to put the pipe on the engine to verify the fitment, so I hauled the engine and transmission to their shop so that they could do the repair.  A day later the downpipe was repaired and I was retrieving it.

I’m now in the home stretch, putting parts back onto the car, and when I got to the motor mounts I realized that once the TiAL inlets go into place there won’t be any way to adjust the motor mounts.  Since I’m swapping out the stock motor mounts for a pair of Stern motor mounts I knew that I’d want to verify the orientation of the mounts was correct prior to tightening them down.  I decided I’d put the motor into the car so that I could make sure the mounts were properly oriented, and this would also be an opportunity to check that in removing the front sub-frame I hadn’t left something out of position.

The motor went into place and the mounts were adjusted and tightened down.  Next up I’ll take it back out and put the piping on for the final install.