by Curt Hoffman in the March 1985 RootesReview
I read with interest the experience of Gary Hellings in removing his engine. I recently removed the engine from my MkII, and also went from the top. My reason was that I’m fairly new at Tigers, and only had rumors of the lower method from the last United. I also needed to tow the shell to a friend for painting, and so didn’t want to undo the brakes and steering.
Now that I have my freshly painted car back, I have begun to experiment with the lower methods; mainly because I need to rebuild the entire front end anyway. Now that I’ve pulled my cross member out of my car I guess I qualify as an expert on the lower method and can easily see where Gary ran into his problem. There is probably no way to remove the engine from below without first removing the cross member. This turned out to be a surprisingly easy thing to do only taking about 30 minutes.
With the cross member removed, I was able to refit the engine, with headers and motor mounts attached, to check for fit prior to sending the headers out for coating. This refit of the engine only took about ten minutes from fitting up the hoist to the body to tightening up the motor mount bolts to the frame. There appears to be a much reduced chance of scratching the paint going in from the bottom. At least based on the scrapes I put on the car going out from the top. The CAT notes describe the lower method fairly well.
I did make one dumb mistake, I took out the cross member in one piece. When I went to dismantle it, I realized that there was no way for me to remove the spring without a compressor. I then had to reinstall the entire cross member so that I could undo the shocks, A-arms, etc. and lower the spring with a floor jack (a method also nicely described in the CAT notes but which I felt I didn’t need to read).
In any case, to summarize the above, I suspect when it comes time to permanently reinstall my Tiger’s engine, I’ll be coming up from the bottom.