The worst thing that didn't fit was the upper alternator bracket. It has a hole which is supposed to mount to one of the bolts on the water pump, but that hole didn't line up with that bolt in any way. So I had to trim that corner of the bracket and kind of notch the hole. Then it would line up, but it was at least a quarter inch away from the surface it was supposed to bolt to. So, I went to Lowe's and got a 3/8" I.D. spacer and cut it to the right length to fill the gap between the bracket and the water pump. That seemed to get everything where it needed to be.
The thing that I broke was a spacer that was supposed to go in the rear bolt hole of the lower alternator bracket. The spacer was essentially a roll pin that slid in the rear bolt hole of the bracket, so that when the bolt that runs through that hole is tightened, the spacer will clamp down on the alternator. It fit so tightly that I ended up using Channel-Lock pliers to remove it, and then it cracked and broke. Haste makes waste. I tried to order some roll pins with the correct O.D., but their I.D. was too small for the bolt. Eventually, I couldn't come up with anything else, so I got another 3/8" I.D. spacer from Lowe's, and cut it to the length I needed for this spacer. Then I also got a piece of 0.005" steel shim that I could use to shim the spacer to the bracket for a good fit.
The problem was, how to cut the spacer to length and keep the cut square all the way around. I ended up taking a piece of the first 3/8" spacer I'd cut, the one that I used for the upper alternator bracket, and I taped it to a 3/8" drill bit, like so:
That gave me a shaft with a shoulder, so that I could put the new spacer on the end of the drill bit and it would be held squarely in place, but still allowed to spin on the drill bit shank.
Then I got a cut-off wheel on my Dremel...
...and I just put the cut off wheel to the spacer where I wanted to make the cut. The wheel spun the spacer on the drill bit while simultaneously cutting it, sort of like an extremely poor man's version of parting it off on a lathe. It worked so well, I even decided to press my luck and use the flat side of the cut off wheel to put a bevel on the end of the spacer, similar to how the end of the broken spacer was shaped. That also worked very well, and I ended up with these parts (shim and spacer):
Here's a picture of the lower alternator bracket with the spacer and shim in place:
A closer view:
And a closer view from the other side, showing the taper on the spacer:
The other major problem had to do with a bracket which supports the back side of the power steering pump, and it has a slot to allow the pump to pivot, to adjust belt tension. That bracket mounts to the block in one location, and it shares a bolt with the engine mount in another location. Because I shimmed the engine mounts to get clearance between my headers and the steering box, that meant that one mounting location of this bracket also got shimmed out, which made the whole bracket cockeyed, which made the power steering pump cockeyed. So, I did some re-bending of the bracket and wallowed out one bolt hole so that it would mount up square again, and that seemed to work OK.
So, accessories mounted:
The alternator is at top right, the power steering pump is at bottom right, the crank pulley and the water pump are in the middle, but inquisitive observers might wonder what the black pulley towards the upper left is...? I have a picture of an early Mark IV big block Chevy on the wall in the garage, and it has that pulley on it, but I never really noticed it or thought about it until I was scrolling through some restoration parts website and saw that they were selling it. I wondered what it was and found out that it's an idler pulley that was only on the "high performance" big block engines. It's basically just a tensioner that allows for the addition of a second belt on the crankshaft and water pump pulleys. I'm not really sure what it's purpose was. I could imagine that it might have been for redundancy, or additional belt wrap to prevent slippage, or something like that, but I don't really know. From a performance viewpoint, it seems like all it would do would be to bleed off power as another parasitic load, but I'm sure it must have served a purpose in somebody's mind. Some places where I saw it referenced called it a "high performance" option, but I think others referred to it as a "heavy duty" option. Either way, after some deliberation, I decided that this was the belt arrangement I wanted for my engine, so I ordered the pulley. I really haven't built the engine for all-out performance, but more for driveability, durability and dependability, so I decided that the "heavy duty" pulley arrangement made sense for me.
Anyway, a few days before the weekend when I was planning to finish bolting all this stuff up for the last time, the body shop called and said they were ready for the car. So, that weekend I painted the brackets I'd hacked up, gave the paint a few days to cure, and then Thursday night I bolted everything up and on Friday my favorite tow truck driver, who's done all the moves of Matilda for me, came and got her and took her up to the body shop. A major milestone, to say the least.
So the body shop has had the chassis for about a week now, and I just stopped in this morning to pay the weekly bill and see how things are going. So, finally the pictures that everybody's been waiting for...:
