Building A Cosworth Powered Kit Car

Fitting the Engine (More Chassis Mods)

The first task was to see if the engine and gearbox fit. Using the Ford engine and gearbox mounts as a guide, I connected the gearbox to the engine and offered the engine and gearbox up the the chassis as the build manual recommends. What was first apparent was the gearbox was exceptionally tight in the transmission tunnel and the gear lever was fouling the chassis preventing the gearbox being located in place. To overcome this I removed the gear lever, taped up the selector housing to prevent any dirt falling in the hole and offered the engine and gearbox up again. As the Cosworth engine as a triple bottom pulley, this makes the engine slightly longer than the pinto, couple this with the bulky T5 gearbox and I come across a problem number 2. The bellhousing of the gearbox fouls the top of the transmission tunnel before the bottom pulley of the engine has cleared the front of the chassis. The resulting situation is the engine get wedged with the just pulley touching the front face of the chassis and the gearbox touching the transmission tunnel. After looking for more technical workarounds, I eventually resorted to the brute force technique of giving it a big push.

(Note: This can be avoided by fitting a 2 belt pulley as found on a non power assisted Pinto engine rather than the 3 pulley setup found on the Cosworth engine).

As I fed the gearbox up the transmission tunnel, it got wedged on something an nearly every stage but eventually the gearbox reached its final location and the engine could locate on its engine mounts……..well not quite!!! I have 3 big problems. The gearbox was resting against the passenger side of the transmission tunnel, the engine could not quite locate on its engine mounts, due to the gearbox not sitting square up the transmission tunnel and the layshaft of the gearbox was fouling on the centre crossmember of the chassis. I could not move the engine over as the bell housing was only clearing the transmission tunnel on the drivers side but 10mm. After lots of head scratching, I reluctantly conceded that the passenger side of the transmission tunnel will have to be widened and a slot would have to be cut on the crossmember. At this point the build virtually ground to a halt as I tried to work out how to do this.

After some more head scratching, lots of measuring and lots of experimenting. I bit the bullet and got the permanent marker, angle grinder and hack saw out. The idea was to swage out the passenger side of the transmission tunnel to meet the centre crossmember at the same point as the drivers side. This meant grinding away the weld and cutting through the tunnel at the point where tunnel meets the scuttle. I then cut a length way slot in the top of the tunnel to the point where the swage would start. Next I cut around the curve of the tunnel at the swage point to allow the tunnel to swage away. Next, I had to hacksaw through the weld down the side of the centre crossmember, it was too tight to angle grind. Finally, I had to break the spot welds which held the transmission to the chassis floor. The transmission tunnel could now be swaged out. Some tidying up of overlapping panels was required then the tunnel was ready for the gearbox to be offered up again.

A 40mm piece of the crossmember was cut away to accommodate the layshaft. This will require extra bracking to put back the strength that has just been removed but for the time being, lets just make sure the gearbox fits.

The engine and gearbox were offered up again and for the first time the engine located itself on its engine mounts. The gearbox was still very tight on the passenger side of the transmission tunnel so to give more margin, I decided to angle the engine slightly hence moving the back of the gearbox towards the drivers side. This required the holes to be ovalised on the engine mount turrets.

With the engine and gearbox bolted in place. It quickly became apparent that the Ford engine and gearbox mounts were not good enough in such a tight installation. I immediately started considering using a the Ford Escort Diesel Engine mount which I used so successfully on my CVH Turbo engine when I had a similar movement problem. The problem here is the CVH engine mount is a lot shallower that the Sierra Cosworth mount but through sheer luck, Old Quantum in Stourbridge had already addresses the engine movement issue and produced a mount which used ..... guess what....a CVH diesel Engine mount and a 80mm turret. Once bolted in place, the engine was significantly stiffer. Now I had to find a revised method to securing the gearbox.

After speaking to John Sampson just after he took over the company, he stated he had used stiff bobbin type mounts to minimise his gearbox mount. He could not remeber where he sourced his from so the quest was on to find something similar. After lots of head scratching and hours down the local motor factors I cam up with the idea of 2 BMW 5 series gearbox mounts mounted on a ali plate which is then bolted to the original Gearbox mounts on the Xtreme chassis.