Two steps forward...one step back

Saturday marked another day where my loving wife and partner in crime showed me amazing patience and allowed me to play with my new friends. Albeit unlike my other friends I am paying this one. So today we wanted to mount the engine in the cradle and time permitting do a dry fit in the bus.

It all started so well, John stripping down the engine while I constructed a dolly that would carry the cradle. Not only carry the cradle but also allow us to raise and lower the outfit to get it to loading height.

I finally finished the dolly, and it seemed to be great. The point of load were centered directly over the scissor jacks which then transferred the load along the long axis of the wheel plate.

With a little head scratching and armchair math, we managed to figure out where the engine mount plates had to be drilled to accept the rubber core engine mounts

Behold it works! The engine fit nicely in the cradle, from all measurements it looks like the cradle should slide right in to the bus. But the hour was late, and we had a dinner party to get to(hence the patience of Michelle), so we decide to call it a day.BUT......
As we were cleaning up, the engine/tranny/cradle was in the middle of the garage- so I decided to move it off to the side. I was quite happy with the fact that with only moderate effort I was able to wheel the whole....1200LBS combo around quite easily. I first pushed it back and then moved to the side and put a lateral force on the contraption.......

Crap!