I love seeing Cummins swaps. I've always thought that a Ford F350 with a 6.7 Cummins and a Allison 6 speed auto would be the perfect combination. I also have dreams of doing a 4BT ISB/Allison swap into a panther chassis aka the Crown Vic/CVPI/Mercury Grand Marquis/Lincoln Town Car quadruplets. Maybe with this new job that dream can become a reality. Keep up the good work. 
Happy Birthday!
matthewmcl (Forum Supporter) said:Happy Birthday!
TIMES TWICE!!!!!
Thanks guys! All downhill to sixty from here.
Been sidetracked by christmas lights and house duties s onot much to report but I'm hoping to get a couple days in this weekend.
I did get my diff back today, all $hiny clean......
I really like what you're doing here. Nice clean work, though the scale of it astounds me! I'm used to being able to shift things a little here and there in the chassis during a test-fit. Not here!
And I think your front yard view looks pretty appealing too.
That view made me think are you close to Kent Raceway and the Mountain Institution?
In reply to Rons :
Obviously a local! About two kilometers.
New diff ready for me to bench press it back in. I expect it weighs around 250 pounds or so.
Shoved the motor back in for another round of crawling around measuring and thinking. Front mount will work quite well as is.
I think I resolved two of the bigger conflicts. First being the panhard rod which would require a hole drilled through the transmission to fit now.
See the mounting brackets? I had a frame crosssmember left over from the freightliner.
So now it goes underneath.
The other conflict is where the heck to put the turbo. It will not fit between the motor and framerail, and I don't want to put it on top of the motor in the interest of keeping the doghouse as small as possible. I also do not want to use a scavenging pump so it had to be mounted substantially higher than the drain line. I considered the top of the transmission, which would have worked but it would have required lifting the floor about two inches. So I decided to use the space between the front right storage bay and the front sheet metal. Not quite enough room so I cut the front of the bay open. I will move the wall in about six inches and close it back up.
And I finally finished with the rear motor mounts. I was avoiding them because I am getting pretty tired of drilling holes in plate steel. I do have a crummy drill press but all the frame holes are my 18 volt Milwaukee. It has enough torque with a 5/8 bit to seriously harm me and I am glad to see the last of that part. 
The frame on the Fossil was an inch wider than the Freightliner, and moving the mounts up sis inches pulled them even further away so I used half inch plate on the motor and one inch plate spacers plus a section of 1/4 inch frame material to make up the difference.
In other news, we had to mow the lawn because it just keeps growin and it is a pain to walk through. Never done that before in December.
How's things coming along?
Your motor mounts equal a session at the local gym weight room eh?
Not much to see right now. I have extended all the airlines to the front from where I disconnected them, and bolted in the motor mounts. I went out to the truck wrecker and picked up a transmission heat exchanger and some four inch lift blocks for the front, and I spent some time on my back looking at the rear suspension (four bag air ride again) to figure out how I am going to lift it four inches to match the front. Looks like it will be a four inch double frame of some sort. Nothing happening worth taking photos of, and I am very sidetracked with a part time to excavating job I picked up that turned into full time, so production has slowed a little bit. But I think I will have a bunch of full shop days over the holiday to get up to speed again.
Here is a photo of my co worker not having a great day at work on Friday. We had to dig him out.
Shoulder looks a little soft...
In reply to ShawnG :
It is a fill site. We were all sitting on logs for floatation and he should have had one more log. That machine weighs 56,000 pounds.
Now what do I do? This thing is heavy. And I am lying on my back.
Finished running all the hoses and rerouting wiring. Also replaced the four front airbags just because.
All that is left before the final install is to fix a mistake I made early on. I installed a new rear main seal without reading the fine print in the shop manual. It seemed pretty straight forward. But when I went to do all the front cover seals I read a little closer and found that they are supposed to be installed dry. Of course I slathered lube on the the rear main before installing it and the flywheel and the clutch and the transmission.....
I could not find much info on installing seals dry, and I suspect that mine would be fine, but I gather there is a coating of silicon on the seal and when the engine spins over some of the silicon is transferred to the crank, so silicon runs on silicon and reduces wear. Anyway I considered how I would beat myself up if I had to drop the transmission again (see engineering problem with tiny differential above).
I thought I had installed the motor for the last time but it was not to be.
I built some spacers/stiffeners to finish up the front engine cradle.
rolled the motor in yet again and aired up the front suspension to check clearance. Not good. I thought the rear mounts were close enough to two of the bags that a decent bump might result in contact, and a big popping sound. So I pulled the motor back out and modified the mounts. Fortunately the flywheel housing is tapped for several different bolt patterns so I drilled a new hole and moved a bolt over.
I thought I was home free so I bolted the rear mounts back in ( previous attempts were without them) and rolled the motor in for attempt number ten.
It was a tight squeeze getting the mounts under the floor. I spent a stupid amount of time tilting the motor up to get it high enough to clear the mounts.
For the next attempt I will cut the floor back a little more.
But it finally dropped into place and I bolted the front cradle in and lowered it down to have a look.
See the bottle jack under the corner? That was a mistake.
Trying to lift one corner of the fossil plus the new motor with the cradle only secured with a couple bolts was kind of dumb in retrospect.
Anyway, it has to come out again. I have a conflict with the the suspension and the starter. I may actually have to offset the motor a half inch to deal with it.
Thats a big ole 'suck'. Sorry man... It still sort of blows my mind how noodly these things (RV's and motorhomes) really are. It's kind of concerning to me, haha. Especially given a lot of the drivers of these things are not exactly well-trained behind the wheel of a land barge. It's basically take out a mortgage and drive it off the lot...
In reply to golfduke :
I followed a big travel trailer a while ago and I could see the camber changes as the axles flexed when he hit dips on the highway.
In reply to bearmtnmartin (Forum Supporter) :
People dont relize they GVWR on their travel trailers is ALMOST maxed when they roll off the lot empty. Clothes, food, toys, water all gets heavy in a hurry!
Bolted the motor in for the last time.......I hope. I was getting a little frustrated with this part because it would bind here and there and unlike a little aluminum four cylinder, this thing really sticks then it sticks. Then it would be this gong show of jacking it up a quarter inch, prying it from side to side with a five foot prybar, heaving, cursing.... You get the idea. Ultimately I pulled it back out and trimmed a crosssmember and that got it where it needed to be. The trouble was that all my previous attempts had been without the motormounts installed which greatly increased the available room.
When it was finally in I had to move the whole thing over a quarter inch to get some space between the suspension and the starter. And I had to trim a bit of flange to make room for a starter bolt. Anyway, it's in, it looks really happy in there and it's a big milestone.
Quarter inch plate to space away from the starter.
And the pesky starter. I think I can slide it out to change it but if you hear me screaming one day it may be that I miscalculated. The big suspension bolt is now about a half inch from the body of the starter. I hope that's enough.
Good progress!
Lift kit manufactured and installed with the front axle, so tonight the Fossil is back on its wheels for the first time with the new motor. The axle had no locating dowels beforer which I thought was interesting. The holes were there though so I added a dowel to the blocks.
Looks solid! Waiting on bolts till Monday.
And I partially installed the alternator but I used the one previously on the fossil as it was much larger than the one on the freightliner. That required a spacer which is half built and now I will need a longer belt. Shouldn't have got excited and bought that earlier.
Nice job on the blocks. Is that to correct some previous sag, or just the heaver engine. Prolly covered earlier, but what is the weight difference?
The Cummins is quite a bit taller than the Cat, and I wanted to keep the extra height out of the living space so I lowered the motor, which meant it interfered with the steer axle. So the lift blocks solved that.
And I am adding around 800 pounds.
I managed to get some kind of steel projectile in my eye which has really slowed me down. Walking around blind in one eye and in pain is not to be recommended as a means of improving one's ambition and rate of production.
Anyway I did get the diff back in.
Next step back here is to replicate the lift I did at the front. I need to go to heavier and taller tires at the front thanks to an expected 1500 pound weight gain up there, so the back axle gets lifted five inches which is a bit more than the front. The steer axle was easy as the axle is under the suspension but at the back the axle is above the suspension so I will have to add the lift between the frame and suspension.
If you look close you can see the suspension is bolted from the parallel link bracket to the second air bag. So the plan is to unbolt all that, drop in the axle and suspension down and slide in a piece of three by five square tubing in. (Three by five by heavy as my fabricator friend says.) He is going to give me a hand with this because he is a Charlie Daniels with a welder. (Points for the song reference)
I am hoping to get this done in one day so fingers crossed. Then I can measur up the driveshaft (three) and install them.
On the front I am busy messing with the charge air cooler. I tried to fit the Kenworth unit that came with the radiator I am using but it did not fit well.
Could not get it to fit anyhow. So back to the Freightliner cooler. I installed it upside down.
Not bad actually, but lots of trimming and it is sitting far enough from the radiator that the AC condenser will have to go in between instead of out front. The inlet is now under the passenger side frame rail which is perfect as that is where the turbo is going. Unfortunately I had to cut off the frame extensions I was planning to use for the bumper mounts and I am not really sure how I am going to deal with that yet. The front is now all cooling.
Incidentally it just looks low because the air bags are deflated and the front tires are somewhat flat. Ride right will be five inches higher.
Lastly, I had some turbo flanges made. The plan is to weld the heavy one into the frame rail and bolt the turbo to it. And I will use the heavy wall tubing to build the ducting from the manifold down to the new turbo location.
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