Well I have finally managed to spend some more time on the car &, after a trying day, have made some more progress albiet very minor!! Firstly I spent a few minutes on a very important race car mod........ the single windscreen wiper conversion lol. But now it looks like once it's powered up it should work nicely. Then it was time to stop fiddling & get serious. So I installed the chassis engine mount arms & gearbox to the engine & craned it into the engine bay to check the fitment of the engine & location of the chassis brackets before welding them onto the rails.
Unfortunately this unearthed a few problems. Firstly it became clear that the chassis brackets that came with the arms were certainly never going to fit & will need to be remade as they don't fit the crossmember correctly, or meet the chassis rails as seen in the picture. Also the mounting hole is too low & the engine is resting on the steering rack. So I will have to fabricate some new items.
Secondly it turns out the transmission tunnels are also different. I have read that the XR4TI body shells had some 400 differences over the XR4I body shells & I can tell you first hand this is certainly true! The more I study & work on these cars the more I am continually finding them. Now it turns out that the the early shells had a narrow tunnel & the later had the wider tunnel to suit 4x4. But the transmission mountings on the tunnel of the XR4TI shell are a lot higher in the tunnel thus making them closer together than my 3dr shell, which means I cannot run a standard cosworth gearbox crossmember. After some searching of the net, as I knew the later XR4TI's came out with the T5, I was hoping to be able to find a crossmember to suit but this resulted in a dead end as it would appear the cars fitted with the T5 from the factory had the wider tunnel. So now I will need to fabricate a gearbox crossmember as well.
