Well . . .
This afternoon was an adventure from hell . . .
Lifted the motor up off the pallet/crate base, and cleared all the wood and scraps away, (that was the end of the easy part) and tried to put it on one of those little engine cradles so I could turn it around and re-lift it, to put it on a regular engine stand.
The little cradle thing turned out to be a total POS, (and I don't mean Plate Of Spaghetti) had to drill out the rear holes for the bell housing dowel pins, and couldn't get but 1 rear and 1 front bolt on each side to line up to the block. The thing's welded all skewed to hell and crocked as a dog's hind leg.
But it held the motor without collapsing or bending, so as fate would have it . . . that turned out to be the one blessing of the afternoon.
So I got the motor turned around and jacked back up in the air to put it on a nice new stand to work on it . . . .
Had to make some little tweaks to get the stand legs to slide in under the lift's legs, but that was easy enough. Cinder blocks and 2X4's are your friends.
Now I bolt the motor up to the stand and start to let down on the lift . . .The motor gets to a nice level position and I let the lift down a little more, and the motor leans down more , let the lift down a little more again, and the motor leans down a little more again, so I'm thinking that this really sucks big time as I'm having a WTF moment, and look to see going on . . . .
The nice new stand, rated for like 1500 or 2000 lbs, has a head fixture with thin, cheesy, totally inadequate, 1" box tubing that can't manage 500 lbs, much less the 750 that the BBC weighs . . . .
So now I gotta jerk that off and go back to the little POS cradle, cuz with all the pallet bits dismantled, that's all I have now to put it on.
I'm so tired of jackin' shit up and jerkin' shit off, that I've declared it Jack Daniels and Aleve time.