legacycentral bbs

So I've just been surfing through the "Engine" threads because I've got to pull my engine sometime soon. I blew mine, gotta tear it apart to figure out what happened. But I'm wanting to buy another complete engine and just swap it in rather than buying a longblock or whatever.

So question 1....
I read about how you must be weary of a torque converter falling out while you hoist the engine out of the bay. Do I have an TC? I have a 92 SS 5mt. A manual tranny, A five speed, 5-on-th-floor, go-faster stick, girlfriend's fun seat... too far? haha but yea, its probably a stupid question but I couldn't find any super clear examples.

Second question..
Is it possible to turn the engine on while it's on an engine stand? My old auto teacher turned on a 350 small block while in class (loud as f*ck) but it was just on an engine stand. Because there's a complete ej22t that I'm looking at and I wanna call the guy to go look at it and even though he says it ran, 12k, blah, blah,blah, I was wondering if I could crank it over to see if it worked? Or should I just bring a socket, rachet, and compression tester and just test the compression of the cylinders while turning the crankshaft?

Thanks in advance!!

only automatics have a torque converter, so since you have a 5 speed that will be nothing you need to worry about. as far as the second question you can turn on a engine while out of the car but it requires a lot of specific hook ups and basically an engine dyno, since your asking the question im goin to assume you dont have the facilities necessary to do that. i would just bring a rachet socket and compression tester like you said and go that route. if you dont have a compression tester, take the spark plugs out and while your turning the crankshaft you should hear a pretty decent sucking noise coming out of the spark plug sockets. while its not fool proof, itll give you an idea

Ok sweet, thats what I thought. Cause people were talking about how you gotta be super careful with the TC and I didn't want to deal with that. So I'm glad I dont!
But as for the engine dyni, yea no. I dont got one of those. So Ill just bring the comp tester to make sure it has compression which is good enough for me cause I already have new heads that dont even have 1k miles on em yet!