4.8 engine and transmission mounts
Posted: 25 Nov 2019 10:35
Good day all
Whilst looking for a rather irritating rattling noise I discovered that my engine mounts are torn and on their way out. So I decided to swap the engine and transmission mounts out myself and ordered the parts from Terrain Tamer.
What I found is: The engine mount on the passenger side is pretty easy to get to if you remove airfilter housing and heat shields around exhaust manifold. The driver side requires more contortionism and use of powerful words. Unless you remove a whole bunch of stuff like water pipes etc. I wasn't prepared to do that so I went for the knuckle busting swearing profusely method. Lifting the engine to get the mounts out when loose did not work. I had to remove the brackets that attach to the engine block. Not that hard to do whilst the the engine is supported. The bracket and mount can then be wiggled out and back in with the new mount. Getting the bolts back into the engine block is a bit more tricky and requires some up and down jiggling of the engine.
So with engine mounts done I started with the transmission mounts. In a perfect world this is pretty easy job. If you support the transmission the crossmember can be dropped far enough to remove the mounts. The mounting bolts are long enough to lower it without removing completely. Unfortunately my world is far from perfect. I'm not sure if it is a design flaw on Nissan's side or whether my troll went for a seaside swim in a past life, but I discovered some nasty rust between the crossmember and chassis. Obviously moisture trapped between the crossmember and chassis and could not get out. Two of four mounting bolts on driver side snapped off. You can see in the pics how far gone they were rusted. I won't go into the details around getting these out of the chassis because I've tried to block the event from my mind. The worrying bit is that you can't see the damage. Looking at the chassis and crossmember there is no sign of serious rust from the outside all looks OK. In the end I'm glad I went through the ordeal, otherwise the rust would have gotten much worse and eventually resulted in something pretty nasty.
Whilst looking for a rather irritating rattling noise I discovered that my engine mounts are torn and on their way out. So I decided to swap the engine and transmission mounts out myself and ordered the parts from Terrain Tamer.
What I found is: The engine mount on the passenger side is pretty easy to get to if you remove airfilter housing and heat shields around exhaust manifold. The driver side requires more contortionism and use of powerful words. Unless you remove a whole bunch of stuff like water pipes etc. I wasn't prepared to do that so I went for the knuckle busting swearing profusely method. Lifting the engine to get the mounts out when loose did not work. I had to remove the brackets that attach to the engine block. Not that hard to do whilst the the engine is supported. The bracket and mount can then be wiggled out and back in with the new mount. Getting the bolts back into the engine block is a bit more tricky and requires some up and down jiggling of the engine.
So with engine mounts done I started with the transmission mounts. In a perfect world this is pretty easy job. If you support the transmission the crossmember can be dropped far enough to remove the mounts. The mounting bolts are long enough to lower it without removing completely. Unfortunately my world is far from perfect. I'm not sure if it is a design flaw on Nissan's side or whether my troll went for a seaside swim in a past life, but I discovered some nasty rust between the crossmember and chassis. Obviously moisture trapped between the crossmember and chassis and could not get out. Two of four mounting bolts on driver side snapped off. You can see in the pics how far gone they were rusted. I won't go into the details around getting these out of the chassis because I've tried to block the event from my mind. The worrying bit is that you can't see the damage. Looking at the chassis and crossmember there is no sign of serious rust from the outside all looks OK. In the end I'm glad I went through the ordeal, otherwise the rust would have gotten much worse and eventually resulted in something pretty nasty.