Engine mounts

The main reason for getting the engine in is to sort out the engine mounting. I couldn't find much information for reusing the standard mounts, with most using a solid mounting or at the very least the standard landrover rubber mounts.

Of course, I didn't want to do that. The standard mounts look really well engineered, and with a metal case around them that is bolted to the chassis I did think they could be reused very easily.

Once the engine was in place and the sump was 1 inch below the frame, I had this on the passenger side;

And similar on the drivers side;

They were in a good position relative to the frame, so it seemed like I was on to a winner. Next job was to make some cardboard templates for the profile. I only need to get them in relation to the frame, so this is what I came up with;

This is for the drivers side, there seemed to be a slight angle to the mount so I did a front and back one. But then the same task on the passenger side only needed one. They're also very slightly different angles. But I can check that again when they're off the car, as the part that bolts to the engine is meant to be vertical. I've also marked their destination on the frame.

The plan will be to reinforce the frame with some 1 inch RHS, then build up the existing box for it to bolt down to the frame. Similar to this;

But this doesn't reuse the box so I'll have to tweak it. I'm also confused why the middle of the bar appears to be missing as that appears to significantly weaken the frame so I won't be doing that!!

More on that later when I build them up. Now the gearbox mount. The one picture I saw reused the PPF bolts along with a metal plate on to a rubber mount;

This seemed like a reasonable approach, but when I fitted the engine I found an alternative option that would work in a similar way but perhaps be easier to implement. This is the bracket that I'm talking about;

The gap from the bottom of the bracket to the frame is 23mm, with the centre of the bolt hole being 28mm from the front plate (and 20mm from the front of the bottom bar, which considering the two distances should add up to 44 doesn't quite make sense but it's close enough!). If I can make up a bracket to go from the frame, through a rubber bush, to the two bolts, I should be able to get everything in the right place and secure. It'll need to be bolted from below, as both sides will be filled in as soon as the aluminium panels get fitted. I'll double check all that as I may need to use a slotted hole to keep things easy to align. Oh, and the two holes are evenly spaced from each other across the centre line, so without that bracket I should be able to centre the engine a bit better.

So that's three more chunks of work that I can complete which is good.