Ms Piggy. Black and Blue!

[broncosbybart]

Engine/trans/T-case is all bolted up and set in place. When I was at Clay's place a while back I saw his trans mount for the NV-4500 from Advance Adapters. I liked the mount much more than anything I had run across and decided to order the mount kit from AA. Of course this required modifying my trans cross member. It was a bit tricky as I have a support ring on the back of the Atlas. The entire assembly had to line all back up correctly or else I'd have to rework the cross member for the support ring as well and I didn't want to do that.

I used some cardboard to make templates from and then transferred the patterns to 1/4" plate steel. Employed the plasma cutter and grinders to shape things up. After a few trial runs and a few tack welds I got it to fit. Took it back out and welded everything. I like how it turned out though it hangs a bit lower than what I had originally done.

Oh, and I did paint the bell housing, engine adapter plate, and transmission. The paint used on the trans turned out to be much lighter of a gray than I was hoping. I wanted to have a color similar to machinery gray or Ford engine gray. This gray is the color they paint nascar frames with. I'll have to see if the paint shop can tint it a bit darker.