I went ahead and had the cross member, Nismo Power Brace and steering rack brackets powder coated a gloss black. I fought for a little while on the color, but came to the conclusion that black is the only color that fits my style for that type of part:
Cleaned up the wiper motor and mounted up the new Chase Bays master cylinder setup:
My steering rack needed some serious cleaning and help. Even though you won't really be able to see it under the motor, I needed to address it:
I cleaned all of the cast aluminum up with some Maxx Solv and painted the rods and body with some gloss black epoxy paint. I thought I uploaded the pic of the finished product to my Fotki, but it's not there. So I'll post that pic later as I'm at work at the moment.
At this point I couldn't really think of anything better than dropping the motor in for a test fit. I want to give a huge thanks to my boys Kyle and Jeff for giving me hand with this:
Me struggling putting the drivers side header in. I actually had to have the motor mounts up and out of the cross member, then drop each header into the car. Then lower the motor into place and bolt the headers up:
It's officially in... well, temporarily:
The nice thing is that there isn't going to be much else in the bay that isn't in there now. I will be tucking the radiator, battery in the trunk, tucked coolant overflow etc. So really the only other things that will be seen in the bay are just a custom intake setup, black braided AN radiator hoses with all black fittings, AN heater hoses also with the all black setup, custom oil filter relocate setup... again with the same all black AN stuff.