Danny Boy's Mk4 Build - Putting the project on hold for a while...

[facultyofmusic]

Here's a picture of the upper front bolt of the driver side header. Right now it's nice and tight and all that, but just a few days ago I couldn't even put the bolt in and my gasket were misaligned. How did this happen? It all started with the driver-side engine lift bracket.
normal.jpg

By lift bracket I mean the thick steel plates FFR install on two sides of the engine for lifting the engine. Here's a picture:
engine_top_down.jpg

The bracket itself was big, thick, and it was too close to the bolt in the first picture. The bracket and the front most exhaust pipe together left no space to install that bolt. Here's an outline of roughly where the bracket was:
blocked_bolt.jpg

At the time I thought I could just install the other bolts and install this one after the engine is in place. After all, it's one of those "easy" bolts right? The problem here is that the ford coyote gaskets have 2 "aligning holes", and the hole in question happens to be one of them. Take a look at the 4 holes indicated in the picture below. You'll see they have these tabs that effectively make the hole smaller than all the other ones. You have to install the bolts for these two holes first because they align the gasket.
gasket.jpg

Because I didn't install that bolt, my gasket wasn't aligned. After dropping the engine and removing the lift bracket, I found that I couldn't insert the bolt because the tabs were in the way. From the two pictures below you can see both the misaligned gasket and the tabs sticking out into the hole.
gasket_misaligned.jpg gasket_misaligned2.jpg

This meant I had to loosen all the bolts, get the header loose enough to shift the gasket into the right place, insert the final bolt, and re-torque everything. To my surprise, re-torquing the bolts was pretty easy! I realize now that it's inserting the bolts that was difficult, but loosening and tightening the bolts isn't too hard. When I realized my gasket was misaligned I posted this thread to ask if it's still good for use. Mike Everson suggested it should be good, so I didn't replace the gasket.

The second mishap with the mounting bracket is with one of the bolts. With the header installed, the bolt can't actually be removed without cutting it in half mid-way. This is because it collides with the header. In the picture below you can see just how much more room it needs.
lift_bracket_bolt.jpg

I used an oscillating tool and a metal cutting blade to cut off the bolt. If I knew about this earlier I would have pre-cut the bolt. There's still a lot of threads to grip into the block after the cut.
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I'm not sure if this is only an issue with FFR provided lift brackets with FFR coyote headers. I hope this information helps y'all out there! :P