1993 Miata engine swap and mods continued

Got the 93' Miata into the shop last week and began the second stage of my friend's Miata drift/street racer/town car project. There are many pictures, not all will be posted but if someone needs a detailed photo give me a shout out. As was said in the blog earlier we'll be using a 1.8 protege engine in a 1993 1.6 Miata. Several modifications will need to be carried out. The biggest mod will be cooling - behind that, the oil pan.

First chore was to pull the fan units out then remove the air box/ air meter unit. this allows good access to the exhaust header which will need to be removed as well. I'll be leaving the intake on until the engine is out.
Once the both fans are removed you can pull the radiator. This gives a lot more room for removing the engine. I took the sway bar off just to add extra room; it'll be replaced with a Racing Beat sway bar anyways.

Lots of room to move, needed for the oil pan to clear. Also, you can see that the power steering and A/C have been removed. With a little contortion work the A/C rotates down and out of the way. From this point it was remove the header and exhaust, then shoot as many pictrures of where things were before.
At this point its back under to remove the drive shaft, trans to differential support (one of the prettier miata parts not seen often) and all the lower trans bolts to the engine.
The shifter needs to come out of the transmission, real simple chore to do. A philips screwdriver for the console and a 10mm wrech have it out in a jiffy. Don't be surprised to find the boot that seals the shifter in the chassis torn. You can see the old boot on the passengers floor with the three bolts that hold it in.

From this point a few more wires, connectors and the clutch slave need to be removed. Then when all is clear its time to hook up the cherry picker! Yay. This was my first time (that I remember...) using one of these to pull an engine out with the trans still connected. Good advice was given to remove all the lower trans bolts. I did however space on draining the trans first. If you do give this sort of thing a go either drain the trans or plug the back end. I was going to drain it but too excited to keep moving on this project
Not sure why but I had to pull the driver's side engine mount to help the engine clear and give some wiggle room.

All the rest of these pictures are of the final pull. It went pretty good, though I have some concerns as to dropping it down into the chassis and hooking up the trans/diff support brace. but now its out we can do our mods!