Motor Mounts, Brutes, and Knuckleheads
 

How to change Motor Mounts on your D2 is well detailed in this forum. This brief but miserable tale is for those that didn't do it right and need 10 hours of labor to right their wrongs.

My '03 D2 came to us about a year ago. A friend all but gave it to us (my then 14 year old son, and me) so we could fix it up and he could use it for the upcoming 2 mile drive to high school, Monday through Friday, and I could use it for hog hunting on the weekends. Its a beauty, and it worked great for about six months, then everything began to fall apart ... but that's a story for another time.

I read on here that one of the reasons for the nasty vibrations I felt between 1800 and 2100 RPMs might be a broken motor mount. I looked. Sure enough, the driver's side mount was sheared off just under the top plate. The passenger side looked good. I ordered a new set of mounts, and got to work.

Image #1 shows what I found ... both mounts were completely sheared off. Loosening the bottom motor mount bolts and raising the engine resulted in both of them being easily removed. Then I got stupid. The passenger side top bolt, while hidden inside a brace, was easily accessed and removed. I was loosening the nut with a downward stroke. I went over to the driver's side, a considerably tighter space not at all meant for size 8 hands, and commited the ultimate act of foolishness, I attempted to again loosed the nut by stroking down (tightening) rather than pulling up (the preferable direction for loosening).

Image #2 shows what happens you over torque an (apparently) brass nut that's hidden inside a blind rabbit-hole. I tried everything in my tool kit to get it loose, but it was rounded and tight and all I did was round it further.

Image #3 shows what happens when you actually start to do some thinking. I took the already removed top plate from the passenger side and went to my bench grinder It only took about 30 seconds to discover that the bolt on the top plate is secured, under and amidst the rubber, by a flat, round disc, about the side of a large coin. Grind that off, and the bolt just falls out. Logic then falsely predicted that all i had to do was grind the coin sized anchor of the bottom of the driver side plate, and everything would be hunky-dory. Not so fast ...!

My intended weapon for assaulting the underside of that driver-side upper motor mount was my 4.5" angle grinder. With a 36 grit sanding disc, it tears up metal fast. The issue ... it wouldn't fit. Not from the top, not from the bottom. I could only get to about 1/2 of the motor mount plate.

Image #4 was the solution. A Harbor Freight cheapy grinder that could get up into the painfully tiny space where that motor mount lives. But my celebration when the plate dropped off was premature. That square base to the bolt still had to be ground down to nothing, then the nut hammered on for a couple of minutes, before it all came to an exhausting end with the nut and bolt in Image #5 dropping to the driveway.

I hope no one ever has to use this proceedure, but its here if you need it.

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