Author Archive: wae

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.

The engine/transmission portion of the engine-side front motor mount bracket is all put together and ready. The bolt holes all line up, even though the bolts themselves need to be replaced with ones that aren’t quite so lengthy. The coupler nut was used as a spacer and rather than trying to hold it carefully while cutting it, I welded it up first and then ground it down.

Once the size was correct, I put it in the drill press and drilled the coupler out to 1/2″ and as the first picture in this update shows, the gap is filled in nicely with a little bit of steel. Oh, and I did go all the way around – including the ends – and grind off the zinc coating before I hit it with the MIG.

Next step is to get the engine secured into place where I want it to actually sit and then bolt up an old body-side front motor mount that I’ve got hanging around. With some cardboard, I should be able to find a good path for the braces that will go up to the engine-side bracket. From the side, it should wind up looking something like this (not to scale):

The brace will be angle iron and there will be some additional bracing done to that of course. At the top, the bracing will terminate in upside-down angle with some gussets along the top to provide strength.

I know I’ve missed a bunch of events so far this year, but it is starting to come together! Finally.

A little more shop-time yesterday resulted in some more progress on the front motor mount bracket! After I joined him at the junkyard in a failed bid to score a good rear end for his S10, Tim came over to the workshop for a little bit to help me with the motor mount creation. What I like about Tim is that he has a analytical yin to my eff-it-all-and-let-God-sort-it-out yang so when I’m doing something that has any sort of structural significance he can slow me down and remind me to measure a third time and check things a fourth. Thanks to his help, the drivetrain-side mounting holes for the bracket are nearly complete!

We did some pretty serious measuring of the aluminum bracket and the bell housing to figure out exactly where the centerlines of the bolt holes needed to be and how much clearance exists around the holes. Typically, getting those measurements is fairly simple but in this case the two mounting points are of an offset depth from each other which made it a little bit harder to just slap it on a bit of paper and trace out the holes. With Tim’s help, though, we were able to determine that the lower bolt hole needed to be 72mm down and 32mm across. As expected, those directions took us clear off the edge of the angle iron in which the upper bolt hole is drilled. From the centerline of the lower bolt hole, there is only 17mm of clearance before butting up against the structural collar, so we decided to go with some 1 1/4″ eighth-inch steel angle iron welded to the back of the existing angle:

Using the measurements that we took earlier, I drilled a 1/2″ hole in that ear and took it over to the car to test-fit:

Just like that on the first try it fit perfectly!

You’ll notice that there’s a gap between the bracket and the bell housing. That is the offset that I wrote about earlier. My original thought was to just get some round tube, cut it to fit the gap, and weld it in. Unfortunately, the tube at Menards was all thin-wall stuff and I didn’t really trust it. Instead, I got a 1/2″ coupling nut. I need to grind off the zinc coating, chop it to fit that gap, weld it on to the angle iron, and then zip the 1/2″ drill through it to take off the threads.

Once the offset is taken care of, I need to build the rails that will connect from the face of the bracket down to the body-side of the front motor mount. I’m going to use the 1 1/4″ angle iron for that and also box it in for some extra strength. Here’s the front-on view of the mount that you need to have in your head to imagine what I’m going to do next:

There are a couple concepts that are kicking around in my head for the connection that goes down to the body-side mount. My primary concern is that I’d like for my craptastic welds to be more about holding things together than taking all the force. I’m thinking that I could weld some of the angle across the bottom, butting it up against the bottom of the engine-side bracket. Then I can cut the angle at an angle and weld it to that brace so that the force is pushing up into angle iron which then gets pushed against the edge of the bracket. I’m not sure that doesn’t just wind up bending the bracket, though.

My next thought is to weld angle iron across the face of the engine part of the bracket to basically give it a shelf. Then the angle that goes down to the body mount would come up and in to that. The more I think about it, the more I think this is the plan that’s going to win out.

Once it’s all together and I can get all the bolts to line up, I’ll take the whole thing off, grind the ugly welds to make them a little less ugly, trim the bracket a bit so nothing is hanging around that doesn’t need to hang, round off all the sharp edges, add some bracing wherever I can, and then paint it up.

Slowly but surely, I am making solid progress!

I finally had time to go get the hub from the machinist and get it installed. As promised, he turned down the hub, put on a sleeve, and then turned that down to match the size of the brand new Timken unit. I went ahead and pressed it into the wheel bearing, but it still had a little wobble to it that looked like it was coming from the bearing, so tore it all down again, put in a brand new bearing, pressed in the hub, and now it seems to be all good!

Nothing is ever that easy, though. I took the time to get the swaybar endlink replaced as well. The one on the car was all disappeared into the mounting hole on the end of the swaybar.

Since it was so far in and I couldn’t get a socket or wrench on it, the grinder came out to play and the old endlink came out in bits.

I didn’t think to put the longer studs on while the hub was out of the knuckle and there is no way to put them in once the assembly is together, so I am back to the short lug studs for now.

Once it was back on the ground, I was able to drive it out of the garage and back in. I used a ratchet strap to pull the engine forward and hold it in place, but there is still something grinding really hard in there. I suspect it’s the alternator on the power steering lines and it might just be a simple matter of moving things around and making sure they’re properly secured.

I’m pretty sick and tired of making and breaking motor mounts for this thing.

Previously it was mentioned (or it should have been, anyway) that the bobble relocation bracket on the transmission got bent up in one of the last adventures in breakage. Apparently it wanted to mount to the firewall.

After whacking it with a hammer for a bit and putting it in the 20-ton press, I was able to flatten it out a bit.

A little bit of welding and some more hammering and I was left with this:

Since that picture, I also hit it with the flappy wheel to clean it up, shot some primer and then a few coats of gloss black on it. I didn’t get a picture, but just imagine in your mind that the above picture shows a bracket that looks just like that, but shiny. And black. And shiny.

To complete the bobble, I will need to pull the bottom section out and build a new strut. I’ve got a wide and sundry array of poly bushings that I think are for a Honda of some sort so I should be able to use those to cushion whatever I build. I’m thinking about some round tubing this time. Something to give it a little more strength.

In order to provide support for the engine’s up/down and rotational movement, it needs to be tied into the core support. The torque strut is fine for the street, and I’ll probably re-build it (again) and put it back on, but it’s held on with a single bolt that’s in shear. When the car is moving over very rough terrain, it’s just too much for that and it winds up breaking that bolt since it’s the only thing holding up the whole front weight of the engine. If all I had to worry about was the rotational force, I think it would be okay.

The problem with the stock FMM is that the engine-side of the bracket goes where the structural collar goes on the 2.4 turbo which would leave a gaping hole in the flywheel/clutch/bell housing area. The body-side of the FMM also interferes with the hot-side charge pipe as well as the block-to-bell housing bracket on the 2.4 Turbo. Fixing the interference with the air plumbing is easy enough – just grind off a bit of the steel on the side of the mount and the problem is solved. But there is absolutely no way that the body side of the mount will fit with that bracket.

My initial plan was to make a plate that would bolt to the offending bracket and then that plate would have some fingers to come down to the mount. Now that I see the impossibility of that, I’ve started making a new bracket to replace the aluminum one that was in the way. I’ve got some bar stock that I’ve trimmed down and put bolt holes in to connect to the block. Next, I’ll need to add some angle to that for the two bolts that connect to the bell housing. That will give me the connection between the engine and the transmission that the bracket provides while not getting in the way of the collar.

Once I have that bracket made, I will attach some fingers that come down and will bolt to the center of the Prothane-insert-filled rubber mount. At that point, I should have a mount that is mostly in tension held in to the block and transmission with 5 bolts. The bracket will also be rocked forward along with the engine so that the forces are directed at least a little bit inward towards the block instead of straight up on the welds that I’ll have to make.

With that mount in place, it should prevent the motor from moving up and down and the torque strut and bobble strut should only have to worry about providing resistance to rocking back and forth.

And they say “hope is not a plan”. Ha! It’s the only plan I’ve got!