Nearly All The Sheetmetal Is On

Before the shrouds could go on, I first needed to bolt on the rear engine mount. With that in place, I could turn my attention to putting together the puzzle that is a Corvair’s engine shroud. When disassembling the 95 HP and Ringo’s previous engine, I’d carefully bagged all the fasteners that held on the sheetmetal pieces. Even so, last night I had to dig in my can of bolts to find two that would work for ones missing. My only mistake was to install the exhaust manifolds before the two front shrouds (the ones that have the hot air connections to the heater box. Fortunately, spinning off the six nuts wasn’t too much of a step backwards. I did, however, discover that the center rear shroud seems to be a LM specific part – two holes do not line up. I looked through my collection of stuff and came up empty. There’s got to be one somewhere, so I’ll search harder next time I’m out there.

With the shrouds in place, I then installed the alternator. All EMs came with a generator, rather than a lighter, more modern alternator. I’ve always wanted to do the generator to alternator swap on Lucy, but never got around to it. Ringo’s generator was working just fine on the previous installation, and I wouldn’t have chosen to do the swap now, but it just so happened the rear engine housing I cleaned up and installed was from the LM engine rather than Ringo’s EM setup. Fortunately, I’ve got the now-required LM wire harness and voltage regulator, so when the powertrain goes in, I’ll use Victoria’s car as my template for the revised wiring. I can always swap the adapter with one from an EM if I can’t get things to operate correctly. Lots of people have done the swap without issue, so I should be just fine.

Next to be bolted on was the idler pulley followed by the vacuum balance tube with new hoses on each end. After confirming with Ariel that she wanted to stay with the dual, pink EM air cleaner setup, I modified one of the brackets for the larger LM-only mounting bolts.

At that point, I went to attach the final piece of the shroud system – the fitting for the right front hot air shroud. Seeing it needed some gasket sealer, I decided that was reason enough to call it a night. It was, after all, past my bedtime.
Sorry about the lack of photos. I’d shut down the garage PC before remembering to upload any off the camera.