Fun to see your progress on this, you do neat work, thanks for sharing it here!
Yes, I agree the final stage working through the finicky details always feels like the hardest and most tedious part. You can get to 95% completion very quickly but then spend an amazing amount of time trying to finish up that last 5% with little brackets, plumbing, electrical solutions etc. I think that's where a lot of ambitious projects die; some never make it to the point where they are fully functional since people lose motivation fighting those details, which is easy to understand. Or they sabotage the project at that stage by getting tired of the effort and settling for weak solutions. IMHO, it's how things are handled in this phase of a swap that makes or breaks the whole package in the end. Fortunately it looks like you are in no danger of letting your standards drop as many folks do.
Your earlier post was an interesting point also, noticing all the work the factory does on the original cars to get those things worked out, I agree with you there. All the little pieces and systems where you don't really pay attention to the intricate engineering effort until you have to re-create something like it yourself.
The length and shape of every single wire and hose, the placement of harnesses and plumbing to avoid interference and maintain ease of access for future service, design of mounting systems, choice of fastener types, etc, are all the result of decisions and design work by the OEM... then when doing a rework as a one-off project like this one, the effort, measuring, planning, trial-and-error etc required to achieve a comparable well-finished result is eye-opening.
Granted, though, those efforts on the part of the OEM are sometimes lazy or unsuccessful or leave plenty of room for improvement, so it's not as if we should think of their solutions as sacred. I'm thinking of some places where service access or procedures are unnecessarily difficult, or a good example, the routing of heater hoses on a factory D24 or D24T engine under the injection pump where over time they are frequently damaged by fuel contamination. Many of us here with the Volvos have rerouted our hoses to avoid that area and also make service access far easier, with no functional downsides. So sometimes we can do better than the factory did, having the benefit of field experience.
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Originally Posted by Nevadan
There's plenty of space behind the head, injection pump and vacuum pump; much different than the 2.4 in the Volvo. Of course that's where the battery was sitting also.
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What is being driven by the V-belt off the back of the camshaft in this configuration? Power steering? That is an unfamiliar setup, not used on the Volvo engines.