Ok, so I dropped the gearbox on my head a couple of weeks back - I probably shouldn’t have tried to lift it in with brute force, and after actually getting it in yesterday I realised there was no way I would have got it in my myself. We lifted it in the first time, and after only about twenty minutes we had it up on a jack and the input shaft was in the clutch.
The next part was the problem - we had to get the input shaft on the gearbox into the bearing in the crank - easy to say, not so easy to do. After playing with it for a while and jiggling around, we came to wondering if there was the wrong bearing in it (I was using the one that came with the cheapo engine we’re using for this stage of the project)
So the gearbox came out again, and while jamming my finger through the clutch into the bearing housing to try to work out how big the bearing was, we realised that one of the springs in the clutch is either slightly loose or the plates are busted - it moves about 2mm if you jam your finger in and wiggle. This’ll mean that putting any sort of power through this 2nd hand heavy-duty clutch will be a joke, but I think it’ll be fine to drive to start with. If not, I’ll just throw in the original clutch that was in the car when the engine blew.
Once we’d worked out that there was a bit of play in the clutch, we realised that having the input shaft in the driven plate didn’t mean we had it all aligned. Gearbox back on the jacks (two this time, a bit easier in the end) and back into the clutch. A bit easier this time, since we knew where we were going and so forth. After about five minutes wriggling and thrusting, there was this tiny bit of movement forwards, and we knew we had the gearbox in.
We pushed it a bit forward, just enough to get another bolt in, and from there we put a few bolts in different places in the gearbox and just pulled the box onto the engine.
Another part done, another day used. It’s getting close!