Engine mount is nearly done

So, here it is in the current incarnation.

The mount now bolts nicely to the dry-sump. It’s actually quite a complex part, made in multiple separate stages:

  1. print the part, make the mould, lay and infuse the part. I’ve already written a lot about this, and you can get to it via the ‘engine mount’ tag.
  2. make the cross-bar. This needs to be very strong in compression and accommodate the hard points of the engine Bolting through it. To do this, I made a 5mm thick sheet of woven glass, infused with hig-temp epoxy. I chose glass because it’s strong in compression, and of course a good insulator: there is no galvanic response issue to be had which would happen if I made the plate out of carbon.
  3. I then made a jig from the front of the dry-sump to capture the wiggly up and down bit and the bolt holes. From the Jig I transferred this to the glass fibre plate, cut and fettled until the plate fitted the sump-front nicely.
  4. Next came the problem of attaching the plate to the cross-member. I had a plan … successful, as it turned out. I bolted the plate up, and lowered the engine down to the mount, onto a bed of the easy-composites two-part structural adhesive. This accurately located the plate on the cross-member. I let that set. All this would give me is accurate location. I couldn’t trust the adhesive to hold the plate in place in the rigours of the engine bay.
  5. Once set, I extracted the mount, and set about fixing it in place for good. I created  some 45 degree chamfered foam corners to act as an interface between the plate and the cross member, meaning not only would the cloth not have to go around any extreme angles, but it would also gain some strength in a rocking front-and-back motion.
  6. Once the fillets were in place (a smidge of hot-glue), I then layered CF between the cross-member and the plate (3 layers of 300 either side) and then one layer of woven glass on the outside of each side. Again, I’m using glass as an insulator between the bold heads and the CF – it’s easy to work around galvanic response issues, so why not do it?
  7. Finally, I bagged it in a tube-bag and infused high-temp epoxy over it again. Then a curing cycle in the domestic oven and viola: an engine mount.

There’s still stuff to do though.

Firstly, the bid coloured in red on the mount needs to go – it is too tight against the left chassis rails. Once gone, I have more room to finally position the engine before I bolt it down. To bolt it down into the floor pan and I have to make some hard points for that. Watch this space. I have a tested technique which I’ll share next.