Thanks for the reply, Paul. I cannibalized the old plugs to anchor the head plate, and see they would be easy to adapt as a lift point. These seem like a a decent, low cost solution as well:
However, based on the lift point position of the commercial head puller/lift plate in my first post, I assume lifting directly from the spark plug holes would rotate the engine clockwise a little (viewed from the front). Probably not a problem for engine removal, but would require a little finagling to line up bell housing bolts during installation.
I'm betting Mr. Ford's engineers came up with a really slick solution to slide the powerplants into place with the fewest possible steps. After all, they did it
millions of times. Anybody have a detailed picture of the factory workers installing the engine?