The journey continues... My buddy came over with his plasma cutter yesterday, and we got to work on the mounts. This friggin' plasma cutter is awesome! It cut through the crossmember like butter. Our first order of business was to remove the old mounts, and avoid cutting all the way through the crossmember.
Before:
We used Easy Off oven cleaner to remove the 22 years of road grime. 20 minutes and done!
After:
The removed section:
Next we used poster board to make a template of the new metal we wanted to put back in. We needed to put a smooth surface with 1/8" plate on the crossmember to weld our new motormounts to.
Grinding the plasma cut smooth:
The pattern transfer:
We cut the pattern out of a single flat sheet of 1/8" steel. To get the bend we needed to contour the crossmember, we clamped the steel to the base of our engine hoist and beat on it with a 3 lb hammer. It worked swimmingly!
Welded!:
After both sides of the xmember were done, I installed it back in the doghouse, put the engine back in the car, checked/set my clearances and centered the motor with the rubber mount bolted to the block. With the motor in place, we measured the space between the rubber mount and the x member.
Since the gap was even all the way around, we cut our perch on a chop saw to be more accurate, and then built the perch on the workbench. We used 3" wide 3/16" steel.
We put the welded perch under the rubber mout on the block, checked our clearances/level again and tach'd it in place...
Thats as far as we got on the crossmember. The next step will be removing it, grinding the welds, adding some gussets and painting it so it looks a little nicer. The crossmember mod took us about 14 hours of work (minus about 60 minutes for lunch and dinner), but was pretty straight forward and fun to do. I think we could have done the mod without a plasma cutter and chopsaw, but it would have taken a few hours more (using a cut off wheel or electric grinder). We decided to test the strength of the mount, so we stood on top of the block and jumped, nothing budged of flexed, not even the rubber mount. This thing is beyond sturdy!