After a six month hiatus from this project, my honey-do list is finally done and I'm back in the man-cave for the winter. I thought I'd go with an easy subject to start.
One of the engine modifications I snuck in a while back but didn't mention was a change to the fuel rail... and nobody noticed! So what does that have to do with chassis systems? Well, in a convoluted way, torque struts. At one point it became painfully obvious that my original choice of stainless fuel rails was misguided. I bought and installed a 4.0L Olds Aurora fuel rail since the layout flipped the connections to the hidden firewall side of the engine. What I failed to notice was that the hard lines crossed right over the mounting boss for the LH torque strut mount.
That meant having pull off the fuel rail and the fuel injector harness to mount the torque strut to the engine:
Then I had to revert to the Northstar fuel rail. Luckily I kept the one I had already bought earlier on, despite thinking I had made a mistake after I'd received it. The Northstar rail is on the left in the photo below. Note how they're almost mirror images of each other:
The Northstar rail only solved half of the problem though. The other problem was the stainless tube I had formed to hide the wire harness. It too crossed over top of, and interfered with the torque strut:
That meant having to pull all the wires out of the tube, cutting it shorter, rethreading it, and adding a length of flexible wire loom to the end:
With that out of the way, the next thing was to order up a couple new torque struts. The rubber bushings in the original ones had somehow shrunk over time and were loose in the aluminium bores. New ones were incredibly inexpensive. When they arrived, I began smoothing the rough casting finish with a sanding roll in my die grinder:
The RH torque strut is shorter than the LH one by quite a bit. Here's the results showing before and after polishing:
The last time the engine was installed I carefully measured and marked the centreline of both torque struts onto the new cross-car beam I had added a while back. It was only then that I noticed that the two torque struts were at different heights:
With that detail in hand, I notched the beam to accommodate the torque struts. Here's the longer, higher mounted driver's side:
With that detail in hand, I notched the beam to accommodate the torque struts. Here's the longer, higher mounted driver's side:
Then I cut out some mounting ears from 3/16" plate steel and test fitted the mounts until they fit snugly. Here's the passenger side mount with the shorter strut showing that it intrudes less into the beam because of it's lower mounting height. (Also note the much larger shock mount in the lower left corner of the photo. The shock itself was replaced with a fixed link to mock up the ride height):
And here's the view of both torque strut mounts ready for welding... but for that, I needed to pull the engine out of the hole again:
After welding both pairs of ears in place, I then took a short arc of exhaust tubing and welded it between the mounts to seal off the hole left in the cross car beam, just barely visible here:
Finally, here's a shot of both mounts welded and ready for primer: