Motor Mount Progress
I paid the junkyard a visit again today, and I picked up a Neon front motor mount. I needed at least the part that bolted to the engine, and I had a suspicion I might be able to make the part that bolts to the front core support work as well. So I got both parts. Now obviously there are two minor obstacles to using a 2.0 Neon mount on a 2.4 with the wrong transmission attached to it. As you can see from the picture above, one of the first things I needed to do was to make it possible to use the bolt hole on the last boss on the block. So I just grabbed a drill and a fairly large drillbit (read, the only big drillbit I have). Now I can run a bolt through the mount, through the boss, through the groove in the bellhousing, and put a nut on the end of it to catch the edge of the bellhousing and hold it tight. I’ll snap a picture when I get that bolt installed. For now, I couldn’t find a bolt that wasn’t either too short, or too long, so I left it out for the time being.
Motor Mount Progress
Saturday, March 17, 2007
The next problem with this bracket was the oil pan. It doesn’t clear the oil pan without “some grinding”.. So I read in the Neon forums. Some grinding involved about 20 minutes with my bench grinder. I swear I lost half my grinder wheel doing this thing. Probably not the best way to do this modification. But it got the job done. It clears the oil pan just fine now.
Just a quick shot here to show the spot where the mount bolts on. The boss sticking off the block is where I drilled the groove into the bellhousing. The hole above it is where that boss is on a 2.2/2.5 engine. The real interesting part is the hole farther down the bellhousing.....
Here is the motor mount bolted up. You might be able to see, I don’t have a bolt in the top hole (the boss up against the bellhousing), as I mentioned earlier, I’ll need to buy a bolt of the correct length for that. But I do have the two bolts installed in the front of the block, and holy cow was I surprised, the lower hole on the bellhousing lined up with a hole in the motor mount bracket! Looks like it’ll be attached rather well. There is one more hole in the bracket, but there’s no way I can make that one work. I think I’ll be ok without it.
As for the part that attaches to the core support. Not a chance. There is no way I can make it work at all. That said, I think I did come up with a solution. Take the old 2.2 front motor mount, the part that bolts to the block. Cut off the end of it, the square part that holds the rubber isolator. Weld some square stock to the side of that, bolt the square stock to the bottom of the core support. I think it’ll be fairly easy to do. I guess I need to buy
some steel next week, and get welding.
Not much else going on this weekend. I ordered a set of Daytona front struts on Ebay, UPS is reminding me why I NEVER ship through them when I can avoid it. I won’t have the struts until next Friday. Forest Gump could run them across the country on foot faster than that. Once I have those, I get to find out if they’ll fit into the Omni strut mounts. Assuming that all goes well, I can finally install the new front knuckles with 11” brakes.
I can’t wait to get this car out on the road to see how it performs. I still need to get around to installing the clutch pedal/cable, as well as the shifter and cables. It’s hard to open the driver’s door all the way in my small garage, so I have been putting it off. Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow, but I doubt it.
I forgot to mention the crazy readings I get with my oil pressure gauge. I have an aftermarket oil pressure gauge in the dash, and it’s always read fairly accurately with my old 2.2 turbo engine. Well I think it’s still reading accurately, at least up to about 4grand, where it PEGS at 100psi!! Wow! If I were running a turbo, I’d probably want to make very sure the turbo never saw that kind of pressure. It’d blow the seals right out.
