Finally everything came together: we had good weather and my Dad was free to work on the car.
I started out by putting in the rack. This didn’t take too long now that I had the right parts. The hardest part was working under the dashboard. I had to lie on my back with my work in my face and barely enough room to swing a ratchet. Once the steering was installed we rolled the car up to the garage and we started work on the motor.
The adapter was already on the motor from when I did my test run a month ago. It was a matter of putting in the setscrews to hold it in place. Concerned that the setscrews could work lose, I put Loctite on them.
I then screwed on the four bolts that held the adapter plate to the motor and torqued them to spec.
Once that was complete, the flywheel was next to go on, and it’s six bolts were torqued down.
Finally the clutch and pressure plate were added. Since I didn’t have an alignment tool, we carefully aligned the clutch disk with the pressure plate.
Tightening the pressure plate bolts.
Using the "chain fall" we hoisted the motor, and rolled the Escort under it. To help the motor go into the transmission, we jacked up the bell housing of the transmission. The motor went in easily. Much easier than a gasoline motor job, my Dad noted. A gasoline motor is much heavier and there are more hoses and stuff you need to hook up afterwards.
We bolted the adapter plate to the bell housing. The only snag we hit here, was that one of the mounting holes wasn’t quite aligned right, and we had to drill it out a little.
Then we jacked the wheels off the floor to test the motor and drive train combination. When we first tried it, the motor would run with the clutch out or in neutral, but when I put it in gear, it would stop running. We went through this several times, wondering why every time I put the car in gear and let the clutch out, the motor stopped turning. Finally, my Dad tried to turn the wheels. They wouldn’t budge. It was at that point I realized I had my foot on the brake! Once I took my foot off the brake, everything ran fine.
The right side of the motor still needs a motor mount, in the mean time we put a 2x4 over the engine compartment and ran some heavy wire under the motor and over the 2x4 to hold it up.
Bob Batson had told me a 12 volt battery had enough power to move the car over small distances. We hooked up the 12 volt battery to the motor again, and I drove the car out to the back yard, where we are parking it for the Winter.
I didn’t go very fast, but it felt real cool to be driving my car under electric power.