Ideal adaptor to put an A-Series onto your engine stand.
Turbo Mini Forums

Here are some pics of the thing I made at Engineering college 10 years ago! As you can see, i've even painted it so you all know it belongs to either me or vegard.







As you can see, it's just a large block of steel with a long Groove done one side and two smaller ones on the other side.
The long groove could easilly be replaced with a couple of counterbores - all it's doing is ensuring the heads of the 5/16" UNF bolts are not proud of the main surface. These bolts are used to mount the block to the alternator bracket mounting point - so you need to drill them to the appropriate centre-distance!

The other cut-outs are to provide clearance for the bolt heads which will allow the bracket to be bolted to the engine stand bracket. Measure your engine stand and see what looks best. If i were making another, I'd simply drill two 14-18mm holes through the block. Then find some suitable threaded bar and push them into the hole till the end was flush. I'd then run a bead of weld around. Because the alternator bracket bosses protrude quite a way from the block, it doesn't matter if you have a few circles of weld on this face ('this face' being the one you can see in the last pic)!

Why such a large piece of metal? Well, you need to take a look at your engine stand and do some measurements:
1) You need to make sure that when you bolt the engine stand face-plate upto the block (which is bolted to your engine at this point) that the bottom of the face-plate is clear of the engine/gearbox flange - also means you can get all the bolts in!
2) You need to make sure you can rotate the engine fully in the stand - remember the gearbox casing 'fins' stick out quite a way.



Finally, the real advantage of this type of mounting block:

As you can imagine, we're not at a perfect balance position using the alternator mounting bosses (on an A+ at least!).
What we can therefore do is when working on the engine either in the upright orientation, or with the flywheel or timing cover pointing towards the ceiling, or the whole thing upside-down - all you need to do is ever so slightly slacken off the large nuts, and you can 'budge' the engine bracket (with the engine attached - LOL!) such that the engine is sitting level then tighten the bolts again. Very useful, especially as most engine stands have a lot of slop in the locking pin hole.
I really dislike working on an engine in a stand that isn't level!!!

Edited by TurboDave16V on 28th May, 2005.

I'll have to bung a picture up of mine as well then... :) I'm using four bolts for my mount. The oil filter housing "holes" AND the alternator holes.

Edited by Vegard on 30th May, 2005.