I’m glad I followed the advice I’d read on another build blog (I think Tom Wood’s) that said he taped up the areas where he was’t gluing anything to and covered the rest – that carpet adhesive gets EVERYWHERE. Almost as bad as copper anti-seize… but not quite. As you can see below, blue painters tape applied liberally to the edges of everywhere and some left over paper from the shipping crates used over the bottom.

With the areas protected, I went ahead and glued in the carpet triangles to the rear bulkhead. It’s a fairly straight forward process, but would highly recommend test fitting everything first and double checking orientation and placement. Then take your time getting them into place; you have a little ability to maneuver them once in, but very little.

The hardest part of the day was getting the tape back off! The glue in some areas had seeped into tape so when peeling it off I’d get blue strands at the edges of the carpet. With the help of some plastic interior trim removal tools I was able to scrape away the blue tape and get it all up, but it took close to an hour until it was really all off the car.

As I was working on the carpet, Adam came by and we took a look a the crank sensor alignment. As I’d found out previously, I wasn’t sure we’d set the crank pulley to the right orientation when we put the motor in. Mildly stressful few days – would the motor have to come back out? Had we screwed something up? ZOMGPANICWTF mostly. Not full panic, but just … a really full amount of stress. I really want this thing to get done right ya know?

But it turns out, thankfully, I’m a dumbass. The other day, when I was rotating to TDC and the Ford TDC pin was connecting with what I thought was the right spot, I wasn’t at TDC. In fact, I was many degrees off from TDC. Adam and I proceeded to pull the camshaft cover from the top and lo-and-behold the cams were not set to TDC. Puzzled, I pulled out the TDC pin from the side of the motor and we rotated until the cams were at TDC. Sure enough, the crank pulley aligned perfectly. We then locked the motor to TDC at the camshaft spot (using the 5mm Ford tool) and the 6mm locking pin dowel (side of the motor Ford tool), then put the 6mm bolt into the crank pulley as the crank sensor install instructions said to do, then attached the sensor following the directions from Ford (they were in the crank sensor box, we used the little plastic alignment tool as instructed). With that done we buttoned up the cam cover, pulled off the Ford TDC tools, and buttoned everything back up. Mystery of the crank pulley solved.

But not before I managed to knock the cam cover, and its dangling bolts, off the side of the car where I’d rested it. Like a dumbass. Result… a big effing scratch right over the exhaust port (the picture doesn’t do it justice). Like I said, I’m a dumbass. Thankfully Derek is going to send me some touch up paint and should be able to take care of it once it gets here.

Daniel