Solid motor and trans mounts.

In yet another move that makes very little sense for a daily driven street car, I decided to go ahead and replace my completely shot factory motor mounts with solid ones. Every mount was beyond destroyed; they had all dropped down and were bottomed out on their housings with the formerly supporting rubber hanging useless. This made for random large vibrations and also lost power since the engine and transmission assembly could pretty much move around freely. I figured the car was already rather loud with no interior so how much worse could the solid mounts make it? Quite a bit, it turns out. The large vibrations were replaced with consistent smoother vibrations, and more rattling of the few items remaining in the cabin. It’s not really all that bad, but in combination with the loud exhaust and no interior, it does get a little tiresome on long drives … which is every day. It did feel a lot better and much more solid though, so I decided to stick with them. My quick cheap solution for now is to just toss in some earplugs for the long drives :). I also appropriately painted “NVH” on my back window since it’s kinda become the theme of the car. Of course, there is no aftermarket for the 2.0L bird, so I designed and machined my own solid motor and transmission mounts out of aluminum and in addition modified and made some delrin bushings for the torque strut “dog bone.”

I installed the mounts one at a time, starting with the transmission mount, then did the rear motor mount, and then put in the front motor mount (this I actually have not made a solid mount for yet, I used a reinforced/filled stock mount.) Anyway, something interesting happened when I put in the trans and rear motor mounts: when I looked at the front mount, I could see that it had raised back into the position it should have been before it collapsed. I figured that meant I did something right in making the other two solid mounts.

rear solid motor mount

solid trans mount

delrin bushed dogbone