Right - a proper update.
Lots has been happening over the last couple of weeks. I'm on holiday and have been spending my time in the shed, mostly.
The cuts in the floor have been plated up and painted, and the tunnel has been smoothed and painted from the underside as well.
The low range shifter was bent and welded to clear the auto shifter
The auto shifter was mounted and a shroud built. This was a MASSIVE PITA as the shifter we had (and most suzuki shifters, as it turns out), "pushes" the cable towards park. The trimatic needs to be "pulled" towards park. Normally, this can be achieved with a rear mounted cable, used by most GM autos, but in a sierra, there is no room to have a rear mount cable, so we had to modify the shifter to make a new pivot.
The water pipe was reworked to turn the thermostat housing through 90˚ and lower it, and then turn another 90 and point it at the front of the car. This is all complete now. It will be fairly hard to change a thermostat, but not impossible, but the way this ended up was miles neater than running down the side of the valve cover as has been done before (and the factory do on the 2.0 motors)
The auto dipstick needed to be reworked to clear the water pipe, and all sorts of stuff on the driver's side of the motor. This was a win - cut the tab off, turned the stick around, made a new tab to bolt it to the cam position sensor housing - viola! all done.
Auto trans cooler was mounted and hosed. Straightforward. We mounted it as high as possible to keep it out of the mud.
Muggins (ex Cj) extractors were cleaned, painted, swapped to a 2 bolt flange, and mounted. a very nice fit once a small section of motor mount bracket was removed.
The jackshaft was professionally shortened and balanced by Ken Hastings balancing in Chifley drive, preston. It was fitted with new unis.
The tension transfer mount (passengers side) was lifted another 20mm, this removed nearly all the jackshaft angle.
The exhaust was built. It runs 2" up to the resonator and 2.25 after that, (only for aesthetics and to lower the note) it runs a generic 2" cat, a straight through muffler and a resonator. we'll see how loud it is, but it should be OK. It's all mandrel bent, runs flanges and is painted. nothing is below the chassis. It sits in three stock suzuki rubbers.
The fuel filler needed and elbow built to clear the chassis rail - done.
Basically, wiring, paint and reassembly remain. The end is in sight!
