Show me custom engine mounts please.

all my own work-



























I do enjoy making a good bracket.........

Very impressed dez. You definitely have skills. Very inspirational

Thats not a engine mount Dez thats Pure Art.

not as artful as those above but do the job nicely

VW diesel in '74 VW bay window bus

It looks like the mount positions on the engine block will be level (or slightly lower)with my chassis rails.

To my untrained eye, this looks wrong, it puts the stress into the wrong place, i.e. the bolts that go into the aluminum engine block?

Mounts that angle down onto the chassis rails place the stress down through the arms and into the rails?

I was hoping to use mounts like these but fear that the stress from being mounted horizontal will damage something or worse, pull the bolts out of the block!

Am I worrying about this too much?

No, not a steady bar, it's actually holding a V8!

Pinched from here www.how-to-build-hotrods.com/custom-motor-mounts.html

either of those mounts are absolutely fine for a v8 (and that tube one looks like its on a SBC). you have to understand how the engine is trying to move to understand why. the flat plate one is actually much better than the tube one, itterms of the angles of the forces applied to it. as each cyl fires, the engine basically wants to kick to the opposite way to the other side of the engine bay, at the same angle as the cylinder- equal and opposite reaction and all that. as 99% of v8s, especially american ones are a 90deg vee, this means the force will be pushing down into the opposite chassis rail at a 45deg angle. thats why if youre using bobbin mounts, they should be at 45degrees rather than straight (like the ones I posted third from last pic up there^) so they actually work mostly in compression, rather than the engine trying to pull or twist them about.

the other factor is the torque of the engine will basically try to twist it out of the car radially as you lay the power down- compressing one mount and pulling on the other. this is where the tube one above could do with some triangulation, as a plain pipe that long could potentially bend, whereas the flat plate one is already trangulated in the right direction.

so on the flat plate mount above, the forces involved only travel through the plane of the flat piece of steel- there is no fore-aft movement whatsoever on this mount. an engine actually trys to move front to back very little on its mounts, and even then it only really treid to do it if its tried going a different direction first and been denied. the fore-aft movement is taken car of solely by the gearbox tailshaft mount on most american v8s- indeed, a lot of em specifically designed to be able to rock side to side here, but not backwards and forwards. earlier engines like Y-blocks (a favourite of mine) actually had twin 45-degree bellhousing mounts, and then only a single mount at the front under the pulley. it doesnt matter either way, it still works the same.

granted, with enough horsepower you could maybe bend one- but were talking high hundreds if not thousands, and by that point you'd have already gone to motor plates anyway like marks car up above, cos no rubber mount can take that kind of power reliably. and a motor plate is just that- a flat plate, with no triangulation as you can see.

engine mounts on a inline engine are a different kettle of fish though, as the two forces (cylinder opposition and radial torque) are always in different directions- downwards for the opposition if its mounted upright, or just opposed to the slant if its mounted at an angle, but then the torque will always be radial.

car manufacturers used to like to use horizontal mounts, often with an extra steady-bar at the top of the engine(like in a mini for example) but quite a few also use the 'best compromise with least amount of parts' method of going for 45degs to handle the torque and relying on both engine mounts being in good order to handle the opposition.

Re-read and I have got it wrong!

My BMW inclined 6 will try to stand up as it fires, but the torque will try to to turn it the other way?

Pistons go down at angle, which makes the engine want twist upright, but the torque reaction is in the opposite direction?