Bell Housing Install

I ordered a bell housing from Quicktime through Jegs. Here's the link I used. http://www.jegs.com/i/Quick-Time-Bellhousing/698/RM-8084/10002/-1?parentProductId=#moreDetails. It cost a staggering $567. It was made to fit the 5.0 Coyote engine I'm using. Gotta do what you gotta do - right?

The bell housing came with all the bolts and mounting plate as well. I found I needed to do a few modifications to the setup to get it to fit just right. First thing I had to do was cut a slot in the mounting plate to allow it to fit around a protruding part of the Crank Sensor.

Here's a picture of the area that is giving me troubles. The old flex plate's mounting plate didn't come all the way around to interfere with this protruding piece.

Here you can see how much the plate is pushed away from the mounting surface. Time to cut a slot in the plate.

I'm glad that this slot won't be seen once the transaxle is in place. Not the best job I've ever done. At least it fixed the problem. Now the plate sits firmly up against the mounting surface on the back of the block. Here's a shot of what the final outcome was. 

Next I noticed that the plate sits right up against the connector location for the crank sensor. I would never be able to get the sensor hooked into the wiring harness unless I further modified the plate. Time to cut some more. Here's a picture of what it looks like after the second surgery. 

Now that the plate is done I turned my attention to the bell housing. After looking closely at the bolt pattern I see that only six of the eight transaxle mounting holes will line up with holes in the bell housing. The very top and very bottom mounting holes on the transaxle will be empty. Maybe a dummy bolt will go in just to make it look complete? We will see about that later. 

The two bottom most mouting holes that line up with the bell housing are actually threaded in the block of the transaxle. Where as all the other bolts thread through the transaxle into the bell housing itself (the threads are in the bell housing for these four bolts) the two on the bottom require you to bolt up from inside the bell housing itself. Not a big deal, but I wanted to make it easy to remove the transaxle if I didn't want to remove the bell housing. 

I found that there are small slots next to each of the mounting holes on the bell housing. However, those slots are too small to insert a wrench. So I decided to make the slot bigger. Here's a picture of how the bolt head looks before the slot got bigger. 

Here's what it looks like after enlarging the slot. Now a wrench will fit in nicely. Both bottom mounting bolts were slotted as shown to allow for easier disassemble if needed. This isn't a necessary step but I felt it would pay off in the long run. 

One other thing I needed to do was to purchase four longer bolts for the transaxle to bolt up to the bell housing. The bolts that they provided (shown above) were about 1/2" too short. Off to the hardware store to get longer bolts. I'm glad they know me so well down there. Nothing like projects to make friends of local store clerks.

With these pretty simple modifications I was able to bolt up the bell housing. I then decided to go ahead and bolt up the transaxle without the flywheel and clutch for now since this will make it easy for me to determine the mounting position of the engine in the bay of the car itself. More on clutch and flywheel I used in another post.