Friday, October 10, 2008

Bolting Together the Rear Motor Mount

Back in this post, I had cut a 1/4" steel plate for the rear motor mount and drilled appropriate bolt holes.


Here is that steel plate bolted to the rear of the Warp9 motor.


I'm planning on using a piece of 2" angle iron (1/4" thick) to attach the rear plate with the driver-side Civic engine mount. In order to get the angle-iron to fit, I had to hacksaw part of the driver-side engine mount flat to accommodate the angle-iron.


This is rather ad-hoc, but it worked rather well. With the motor jacked into place and held up by a vertical 2x4, I used small clamps to hold the 1/4" thick angle iron in place (5" long and 2" wide). With this setup held in place, I used a scratching awl to mark circles in the angle iron that matched the holes on the engine mount and the vertical plate.


I then unclamped the angle iron and drilled the holes that I had marked with the scratching awl. The holes for the motor mount are 1/2" in diameter and the holes for the vertical mounting plate are 25/64" (1/64" greater than 3/8"). Note that the rightmost 1/2" hole in the above picture is very close to the right-angle in the angle-iron, so you'll have to put the 1/2" bolt in the hole before mounting the angle iron to the vertical plate, otherwise, there isn't enough clearance to slide the 1/2" bolt in later.


With the holes drilled, I used 1/2" bolts and 3/8" bolts to clamp the whole thing together. The clearances are kind of weird for the horizontal 3/8" bolts. To get enought threads into the nylock nuts on the backside but not hit the chassis support, I had to add some washers to the rightmost bolt. The leftmost bolt had to be shorter. I'll try to get lengths on these later as part of the directions.

The vertical 1/2" bolts have regular nuts in the middle as spacers and nylock nuts on the top to hold things together.

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