A few hours later: The engine pulled and mounted on a stand with the (filthy) transmission lurking in the background. This is a dirty old engine with plenty of miles on it. The valve and timing covers were refreshed years ago during some previous engine work, as was the valley, otherwise it would look even worse.

The whole engine bay will be stripped down and refinished.

Fully-stripped block.

This is nasty - rust deposits and build-up is all around the liner area.

Piston/liner assemblies - straight out of the engine.

Top-end bits. The heads will be decked and rebuilt and the camshafts will be replaced.

The upper crankcase: fully stripped and ready to send to the machine shop.

Bottom end bits. The bearing shells will be replaced and the rest will be checked and measured.

With the engine bits off to the machine shop, it's time to switch gears to another section of this car: the brake system. We'll start with these cruddy calipers, which are most likely thirty years old.

These carbon steel pistons are pretty rusty - they'll be trashed. Once fully dismantled, the calipers will be cleaned, glass bead blasted, re-plated in the proper yellow zinc, then reassembled with new parts. They'll be even better than new, because stainless steel components can be used to prevent this rust issue from happening in another thirty years.

This car did not have the original trailing arm bolts, but these 10.9 grade replacements are slightly bent after about ~40k miles of service. These will be replaced with the absolute best: "Toby TAB" alloy bolts, which are made of Inconel. This alloy is used to hold wings onto airplanes; it's overkill for DeLorean's application and it will last longer than the rest of the car.

Now the entire rear suspension has been gutted.

And things are looking pretty poor up front too. The bonnet has been removed in preparation for some paint work in the luggage compartment. Has this project hit rock bottom yet? Not quite... there are still a few more bits to come off before this project turns the corner and starts to move towards the finish line.