New Engine Mounts

 

New mounts in place

After some time, the new engine mounts had arrived. As agreed, to make it as quick a turnaround as possible the mounts were not powder coated. They were only intended to test out the new installation. The main concerns with the new mounts were clearance at the front of the engine, engagement of the already shortened prop shat and obviously clearance of the clutch lever to the chassis.

 With the new mounts in place, I set about making some of the key measurements to feedback to GBS.

Engine front clearance - old mounts

Engine front clearance - new mounts

Clearance at the front of the engine is tighter but acceptable. There is also a little scope to move the engine back a few mm.

Prop shaft engagement - old mounts

Prop shaft engagement - new mounts

This is slightly worrying. The prop shaft end piece is 110mm long and the engagement seems a bit marginal. Rich at GBS managed to find the specs from Mazda that confirm that the engagement is within the specification. I will also move the engine back as far as it can go to achieve a bit more so long as I get clutch lever clearance......

The next stage was to temporarily rig up the flexible clutch line and bleed the clutch. First time for everything, but that was pretty straightforward. What was less straightforward was engaging the clutch with my hand whilst trying to take a photo of the clearance.

Clutch engaged with no freeplay

Clutch disengaged - we have clearance!

With the clutch fully disengaged I have clearance! There is a little scope left to shift the engine back a bit, but also need to account for clutch wear as well. If I really needed to a little grinding of the clutch lever could be done as well. 

So now to send the mounts back to GBS for powder coating and move onto the next steps in the build.

Engine In!

 

New clutch in

So the day arrived that the engine could have a trial fit in the chassis! First thing to do was reattached the gear box after putting in a new clutch. Decided to go for a standard Exedy clutch since I am not planning to put more power into it and wanted good driveability.

Gearbox attached

Gearbox was reattached after cleaning up the clutch lever and renewing the bearing. Bolts all torqued to spec in Haynes manual.

Getting the engine in the bay is an absolute pain in the bits for a newbie. Thanks to my father in law and a lot of swearing we managed to get the engine and gearbox located on the mounts. I had to remove the mounts and alternator to get the engine in. I also needed to remove the water pipe on the exhaust side of the engine since it clashed with a chassis rail, will deal with that another time. I used lots of protection on the areas most prone to clashes which kept any marking of the chassis to a minimum.

And it's in - finally starting to look a bit more car like

After the initial euphoria of the engine being in I decided to check if I 'got lucky' with the clutch lever position. I heard a few builds using a Mazda 1.8 VVT engine ended up with a clash between the clutch lever and the drivers footwell panel.

Bugger

With the engine as far forward as possible, once the freeplay was taken out of the clutch lever position, there was only 5mm clearance from the lever to the footwell panel. The throw of the lever is around 10mm to disengage the clutch, so no chance of that happening here.

Trawling the GBS owners Facebook group I saw a number of solutions ranging from a clever mod of the clutch lever (which required welding, so not in my meagre skill set), allowing a clash with the chassis, and grinding the clutch lever down. The worst one was someone suggesting to cut into the panel and chassis.....

None of those were for me because I can't weld and the other solutions didn't sound very sensible from an engineering point of view (and I am an engineer of sorts). Also, on principle I thought given the chassis is designed for the Mazda (the ideal donor as advertised), this should not happen. So I contacted GBS to see what they could offer.

Turns out Matt had one in the workshop with the same issue and he had specced some new engine mounts to shift the engine 10mm forward to get that one through the IVA. After what seemed like lots of calls and discussions, and waiting a while for Rich to make a decision, a way forward was found. I agreed to beta test the new engine mounts and provide some feedback..... to be continued.