pulled engine, removed pan. The pan is definitely not flat, nowhere near. Cleaned everything up, bent the pan rail close to where it needs to be and reinstalled. Did that yesterday. Today I reinstalled the engine after a smoke test, all is well. So far. Had it running for a few minutes earlier but it was getting late and I don't really agree with fumes too much, not inside the shop anyway. I'll run it more later this week, outside. Makes a little more vacuum at idle too. 4" before, 7" now.
Dunno if I damaged the pan or what, but to conclude, you can't be too careful with this stuff. Gotta watch everything. Thought about drilling the pan rail so it'd have the extra bolt, but there's a weld right there and it'd take a good bit of work to make a bolt go through it, and even then because the rails are pretty thick, I don't know if it'd do much. The stock pans are paper thin and they NEED that bolt.
On another note, on this car, the transmission has to come out before the engine (they don't come out together) and I also noticed that when I was under it after the last race a big of fluid on the pan fins....looked at it while it was out and found the bellhousing hits the pan rail; I guess that wasn't trimmed quite enough when I cut the case. Fixed that too. Had a tiny tiny leak at the time. I know why it was like that too. I converted the front thrust washer to a bearing and in doing so had to use a thinner pump gasket, which put the pump that much closer to the pan rail. Only a few thousandths but that's all it took to hold the pump just far enough away from the case to cause a very slight leak. Fixed now.
