Time to cash in road tax and fill out SORN after driver's side engine mount came apart.

I didn't make this but it doesn't require an engineering qualification to realise this is a sh*t design.

In case you cannot work it out, a steel plate welded onto a squre tube and the sticky out bit of the plate, that has no support behind is was used to hold the engine mounts.

exhibit 1; the broken mount; red line should be horizontal:

broken mount


exhibit 2; a shot of the passenger side showing really bad engine mount design

bad mount design

Not good - especially when welding in a couple of triangles made from the same steel sheet could have braced that quite nicely.

Thats Bad....... even my worst bodges aren't that bad

Unfortunate - any other damage occured?

the chassis tubes in that bottom pic all look weird

hardly a big job to fix though, can't you weld?

Hardly the end of the world, shouldn't take too many hours to fix that up and certainly not the whole rest of the summer!

Nasty.... What chassis is that???

Can't you get it welded up locally? looks fairly straightforward to re-weld and brace it up properly without dismantling it. Only need to take the engine weight on a hoist, remove the alternator, reposition the mount, weld, and triangulate

You could call out a mobile welding man. Might be worth it...... Shame not to have a car for when summer finally arrives...

formula 27 - plan built.

there are two rails along the base of the chassis so traingulation is doable. you can see one just be;low the alternator and hte other one to the tight of that in the photo. the square tube sits o nthe left hand rail so another support from the RH rail to the metal plate would fix it.

sod's law means that the inaccessible side has given way!

hmm, my original though was to remove the engine, redo the mounts so they are like a "turret" i.e. have support both side of the engine mounting rubber to the chassis and slip in a 1660 engine for the 1300.

now I am thinking of doing the least possible amount to get back on road - a triangular fillet and maybe a support rod too to weld in but the problem is getting acessss with the welder. (save the engine swap for winter).

[Edited on 29/7/08 by 02GF74]

god's do the engine swap during the snow not in the summer! that would take me less than a night to sort out.

A bummer, but it should be an easy fix. The same thing happened to me a while back. I had bodged up Pinto mounts holding a Zetec. I got new Zetec mounts and bolted in a 4mm steel plate between chassis rails. Then I just jacked the engine straight, drilled a hole through the new plate and bolted up the mount. Good as new.