Author Archive: wae

I took a couple minutes yesterday to go ahead and get the car back down on her own wheels. I checked that all the motor mounting bolts were secure, and took the opportunity to correct the camber on the left side. I also was getting a significant amount of movement on the left side that went away when I ensured that the strut collar was tightened all the way. That is something that will need to be watched. While changing to the street tires, I let the car warm up to top off the coolant. Once it was warmed up and stopped burping air, I took it for a quick drive.

I didn’t go too far before I was getting fluid on the windshield and some smoke. Then I lost power steering. My guess was that the power steering lines had gotten in the way of the alternator pulley and had been cut. The real culprit, however, was this:

This would be the wrong place to install the radiator pressure cap. The worst part is that I paused before driving off to get out to double check that I had put the cap back on but decided not to because I absolutely remembered putting it back on. Oops.

A quick trip to Kroger resulted in beer for me and distilled water for the cooling system. I bled the system again, actually put the cap back on, and drove it home.

Made the drive perfectly with no further leaks or other problems. It didn’t even catch on fire a little bit. The idle is pretty touchy still and I do need to take care of that, but for now I need to focus on getting the motorhome ready to go for the two-day event this weekend.

The freshly painted engine-side bracket looked pretty nice on the bench,

But it looks even better when it’s all installed on the car!

And even better yet when it’s all bolted up and holding the weight of the engine!

The initial plan was to just slam things back together and get the car on street tires for some driving around. But there was the problem of the torque strut. To keep it from rubbing on the oil pan, I was using a pretty long bolt and some spacers. As I looked at it, I realized that really what should be done is the bolt hole needed to be moved over about a half inch. But half-an-inch from the existing bolt hole was air. So, here we go.

It took a couple hours, but using what I learned from re-shaping the engine-side bracket, I added some metal to the bracket to extend it farther towards the right side of the car. A little bit of hole-drilling and then I mocked it up to see what needed to change.

Turns out: Not much! The heim joint was originally held in with a bit of all-thread and some nuts as spacers. That was a PITA to remove, so I looked for something else to use to space and center the heim joint. Instead of using the solid bobble mount, I went to the regular factory strut. So laying on the floor of the garage under the car were two bits of pipe nipple that had been cut down to use as spacers for the identically-sized heim joint that was the lower end of the solid bobble. The needed to be cut down a little bit more, but with that done I had my spacers. It took a little bit of persuading (hammer time!) to get everything to line up just right, but now the torque strut is bolted up a little bit closer to the engine and it doesn’t rub against the oil pan:

By the time I had all that done, it was almost 1am and I was wiped out. So I went ahead and left the rest of the work for later. Here’s my list:

• Top off coolant – I lost a bunch when the motor mounts let loose last time and separated the hoses
• Secure power steering lines – they’re very close to the alternator pulley
• Correct camber on left-front
• Tighten strut body on left-front
• Put on street tires
• Do some testing
• Extra credit: Reconnect the digital coolant temp gauge sender. That will require some work since the wires are broken off right at the epoxy

A trip to Lowe’s netted a new spool of flux-core wire and some new tips which enabled me to finish attaching the additional material to accommodate the correct angle of the engine. A little bit of welding later and I had this:

I was all set to just get it wrapped up on Sunday, but I put my drill bits in my B.U.T.T. and then left it at home. So, I had to wait to actually put the bolt hole in. In the meantime, though, everything got bolted back up to the car in order to mark the orientation and position of the body-side mount against the engine-side bracket. From there, I did some careful measuring and template-making so that I could mark the bracket in the proper place. The right side bolt hole was pretty easy to drill and was all good to go. The left-side bolt hole, however, landed right on the edge of the angle-iron that I used to put the right angle on the arm of the bracket.

The new bolt hole is the smaller one to the left. That’s the starter hole and once it got to the 1/2″ size that wasn’t going to work too well. To mitigate that, I added a few layers of 1/8″ steel and re-drilled the hole. That gives the bracket enough “meat” to be able to support the bolt. As a side benefit, it also makes the bracket wide enough that I don’t need to add washers in order for the nut to be able to catch the threads.

Of course the final test was to bolt everything back to the car once more with all the stock(ish) mounts connected to make sure that everything finally aligns. Good news:

Perfect (enough) fit! You can see that the bobble strut is bolted to the frame bracket in the back and that, while a little close, the body-side mount is not hitting anything. I have to take the whole thing apart again so I can sand down and paint the engine-side bracket and at the same time I’ll grind off a little bit more of the body-side mount just to make sure I don’t put a hole in the charge pipe.

After a whole week of celebrating family birthdays, I had a chance to get back to fixing this problem. Step one was to cut the bracket down some more while also determining what additional material needs to be added.

Once the bracket was trimmed to fit and the cardboard bits were made, more of the 1/8″ bar stock was cut up and welded to the right side of the bracket. This was one large bit that went to the outside followed by a small corner that was welded to the inside so that the rubber bits of the mount are completely covered.

The left side is a lot more complicated because of the angle. I added a little bit of bar stock and then ground another bit down at an angle to support it. I need to get at least one more bit ground down and installed, but unfortunately I ran in to one small snag: Ran out of welding wire!

After hitting up Lowe’s tomorrow morning, I should be able to get this wrapped up pretty quickly.

After letting the paint dry, the new bracket bolted up perfectly and looked pretty good. It cleared everything and getting the bracket bolted to the mount was pretty easy.

The next step was to hook up the bobble strut, so I grabbed the relocation bracket and the bobble and went to town. First, the remains of the solid bobble had to be extracted, and then the bobble had to be adjusted slightly since the k-member bracket had gotten a little pinched. All that was great, but when I went to bolt everything up, it didn’t fit. Turns out the motor is in the wrong damned place thanks to the front mount. In retrospect, it seems pretty obvious that I should have put the bobble strut in first and then measured and made the front bracket, but it didn’t really occur to me that the angle of the motor would much matter with the bobble. Maybe if I were using round steel instead of the actual bobble the space wouldn’t be a problem, but in any case this isn’t going to work.

So back to grinding and cutting.

With those cuts done, the bracket now fits against the core support, but there’s a new problem:

The bolt hole is completely out of alignment now.

That means that I need to add some material to the bracket and re-drill the bolt hole. I’m thinking that I’ll overlap some bar stock on the outside of the bracket and use that overlap to weld up more flat bar that abuts the existing arm. The left side of the bracket will be a little more difficult since the corner is in the way a bit, but I should be able to figure that out as well.

For now, I think I can modify what I already have instead of starting over, but it would have been really nice to be moving on to the next thing instead of doing this thing a second time.

For the first time since the 2.4 has gone in to the car, there is now a front motor mount!

The bracket seems pretty sturdy as it sits right now and any additional bracing that I put in place is going to make bolt access really difficult, so for now I’m going to try it as it is.

Before I got to that point, though, I had to drill the bolt hole for the other side of the bracket. Which meant that the whole operation needed to be bolted back on to the car and the motor needed to be located so that the bolt hole position could be marked.

Then the whole thing had to be removed again and the hole drilled.

The edge of the bracket was also trimmed up a little bit and I rounded off all the sharp corners. Then I had to bolt the whole thing up again to make sure that everything was correct and to see how to add additional bracing. That was the point where I decided that any bracing I add is just going to make it very difficult to install and remove the bracket, so for now we’re going to try it without.

The final step – before bolting it onto the car for what is hopefully the last time – is to put a little bit of paint on it.

Then this bracket needs to go back on, the bobble strut relocation bracket and the bobble strut need to be re-installed, and then the right-side torque strut needs to be re-attached. Ideally, I will also replace the through-bolt for the front mount with a slightly shorter bolt – the 110mm one that is there now is long enough that the threads end before the bracket begins so I have a wad of washers in there at the moment.

Another thing that needs to be done before I can do some street testing is the front left camber is way off and needs to be corrected, plus the strut body is very loose and needs to be tightened up. Then it should be good to have the street tires installed, the coolant topped off, and then hit the road.

The bracket is getting much closer! The whole assembly got bolted back up to the car and the bracket was marked again. Not enough material had been removed from the bit of angle iron, so I ground that down some more. To make sure everything was held at the right angle, I put the body-side mount in place on the workbench, clamped the other plate on, and tacked it in place – very slightly to avoid heat-damaging the motor mount and insert. Some more booger-welding later, and now I have this:

I’ll bolt the whole thing back up again, verify the location of the engine versus the existing bolt hole, then mark the other bolt hole, unmount the whole apparatus again, drill the hole, and mount it all back up to make sure it’s right. Assuming that works out, then I need to clean up the existing welds, trim the bracket down to prevent sharp edges, and add some gussets for strength.

Continuing the creation of the engine-side bracket, I turned to that most reliable and inexpensive method of rapidly prototyping complex objects in three dimensions: CAD. That would be Cardboard Aided Design.

Starting with the left side, I made a slice of cardboard the same size as the bar stock that I’m working with and got it put in to place. Rather than trying to figure out what angle things needed to be held at to attach the connector, I left the bracket bolted to the engine, clamped the shaped bar stock to the body-side mount, and then tacked it in to place.

I did the same type of design on the right side, but there isn’t as much room to work with over there. In order to give that connector enough “meat” for a solid attachment, I cut down a bit of the angle to weld on to the existing bracket.

With the left side in place and the wedge added to the right side, the next step is to bolt the bracket back up, put the body-side mount in place, and make sure there’s enough room to slide the bar stock between the rubber mount and the wedge. Once that’s ground down to size, the bolt hole needs to be put into the left side, then the whole thing needs to be bolted up again so that the right side plate can be tacked on and the bolt hole location can be marked. Then the whole thing comes off again to weld up that plate, drill the bolt hole, and then bolt it all back up.

It will come off one more time because I need to put some gussets in place to give some strength to the bracket. Rather than applying those gussets right away, though, I need to ensure that I don’t block any bolt holes or constrict the space that the bracket needs to be attached to the body-side mount. So with the whole thing bolted up, I’ll go ahead and mark out the spots that I need to keep clear then pull the bracket off one last time to strengthen it, grind it down, paint it up, and then it should finally be good to go.

For now, here is the bracket in all its booger-weld glory:

Now that the engine-side mount bracket is built, the connection between it and the body-side bracket needs to be made. Using some reclaimed hardware from a Ford Focus, I bolted up the body-side mount and used the captive stud to finish bending the bottom of the core support into place.

When I started this process, there was the knowledge that things were at a bit of an angle, but dealing with that was a “later” problem. It is now officially “later” and this is what I need to deal with:

The two brackets are also much closer together than I had envisioned in my head, even though I knew they were going to be close. That will work in my favor, presenting me with less material to flex and then break. Based on what I can see, it appears that it’s about a 10 degree cant to the right.

Other important numbers that I’m going to need for later:

• The rubber part of the mount is 70mm in diameter
• The overlap of the body-side mount to the engine-side mount is about 10mm deep x 62mm long
• The right side of the car (left side in the pictures) is 140mm from the rubber insert to the engine-side bracket

How I use that information is yet to be determined, but I’m thinking about ways to trim up the engine-side bracket and then attach some angle iron. I also don’t remember exactly how or why the original 1gn engine-side bracket didn’t fit, so I may try to find that and see if it might just be easier to modify that or cut it up and attach it to the engine-side plate that I already made.