Well well, you have certainly been busy. Looks good, hard work pays off.

 

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Mated the engine and transmission today. Torqued the flexplate bolts to 85 ft-lbs with red locktite and the converter bolts to 50 ft-lbs with red locktite.

Because of how hot the torque converter gets, the red locktite has the effective strength of blue, so the bolts will still be easy to remove. We've had both of them come loose on the dragster.

I added a couple ground straps - one from one head to the other, and one going from the top starter bolt to the driver side cylinder head.

I hooked that strap and the main lead to a battery, and made my own solenoid jump switch, and primed the engine to 70 pounds of oil pressure. The oil pressure is being regulated by the bypass spring inside the oil pump - it's probably making closer to 90 pounds at the gears. And that's just spinning off the starter; imagine at idle RPM.

What that tells me is that I can probably stand to go down one viscosity, from 20-50 to 10-40 or even 10-30.

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It's in. But as usual with racecar stuff, nothing fit first stab.

First, the motor mounts were wider than the saddles

Then, the oil pan hit the K member. So I put a 2" spacer under the transmission

Then, the driver side header hits the steering column - Spintech flattened the tubes in the wrong spot (I knew about it before, but didnt know it was so severe)

Then the exhaust wye pipe hit the cab. I'll have to run a collector spacer.

Then the driver side of the wye pipe didn't line up at all. I'll have to get the splice cut and stretched.

So I ground the motor mount really tight - it's very much a swedge fit. Drive side is T-slotted from the factory, so I slotted it some more, then slotted the passenger one (which is just a drop-slot from the factory).

Then I notched the K-member in the closest spot to gain 1/4" of clearance.

Transmission ended up being 2-1/4" higher than it used to be.

With the trans "in place", I went to line up the driveshaft. The carrier bearing right now is mocked at 3.5" higher than it used to be. That makes a pretty sharp angle going down to the pinion. That's going to be fun to sort out.

Procharger fits as intended. Need to nibble at the inner fender some more, and move the brake line (which I already planned on). Inlet tube fits kinda how I expected it to, and charge pipe will be a PITA as I figured. Definitely will need to notch the blower plate.

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Can you use a 1 piece driveshaft??

 

76 inches from trans to pinion. Not just no, but NoodleNo.

 

They make tubular K-member replacements for 1970s muscle cars that stand up to some serious horsepower, and their purpose is to allow engines not designed for the car to fit. Might be something to think about. If you could fab one up (I doubt anyone makes one for the 99-04 Dakota) you'd be able to solve both your oil pan clearance and trans angle problems while taking some weight off the nose. Fixing the engine angle would also most likely solve all of your header problems as raising the back of the trans 2 inches also aimed everything else up by the same degree of angle. This would also allow you to set the engine a bit lower in the bay, improving handling and possibly nipping future hood clearance issues in the bud.

Tubular K-member example -