How To: Change your 94-97's front engine mount
09-26-2007, 10:11 PM
#1
How To: Change your 94-97's front engine mount
I've been driving my car with a bad front engine mount for a year, and after reviewing the Honda shop manual, I decided to give replacing it a third shot.
I didn't take pictures as I had no clue if I'd get any farther this time, but hopefully my steps make sense and others find this useful, as I pretty much had to discover this combination of documented methods myself.
Before you start, get your P.B. Blaster (if you don't have some, get some, Lowes and Home Depot carry it along with auto stores) and soak the three block-to-bracket bolts on the bracket just below the upper radiator hose, as well as both sides of the mount's through-bolt and the mount-to-crossmember bolts as best you can.
IMPORTANT NOTE: your front engine mount bracket has a nut WELDED to the driver’s hand side. You must access the bolt head from the passenger’s side to get it loose. No shortcuts with Honda!
•Get your car up in the air on your jackstands. If you have a nice big hydraulic jack instead of an AutoZone cheapie, don’t get it too high - we need to use that jack’s reach later to support the engine to get the mount loose.
• Remove the lower splash guard. Working from the passenger fender well, at the top edge there is a black plastic pop rivet you can pull out (and save) with some pliers, and then bolts running across the underside of the car, as well as an additional pop rivets and some well-hidden bolts in the upper corner of the guard on the driver's fender.
•Remove bolts towards the rear of the car. The splash guard tucks under another piece of plastic connected to the bumper - if you're unscrewing plastic screws underneath the front of the car, you're working too far forward. Once everything is unfastened, you should be able to pull the splash guard towards the back of the car and have it all fall out easily. If you're pulling even moderately hard, you've missed a bolt or a pop rivet. (If you’re wondering, you don’t need to remove the splash guard just to drain the radiator, but you to do get access to the radiator and fan bolts)
• At this point you have a theoretical option of only removing the radiator fan, or the option I actually took, which was removing the entire radiator. I have no idea if the clearances are OK with just the fan out, but you can try that first to save time. Just pick out the steps for removing the radiator fan and ignore the radiator removal instructions and the rest of the process should be the same.
•Radiator removal process:
Uncap the radiator. Get yourself a decent-sized bucket (a big Home Depot bucket is excessive and probably won't fit - only a gallon or so is going to come out here) and place it underneath the drain outlet in the center of the radiator’s underside. If the radiator drain plug is stuck, use pliers or needle-nose vise grips to help bust it loose.
The radiator will drizzle and drip for long time after the initial outflow, so move back up to the top of the car while the radiator is draining.
•Back on the top of the car, remove the two bolts for each of the cushion mounts on either corner of the radiator. On the driver’s side, remove the single bolt holding the wiring bracket to the corner of the radiator and condenser fan. On the passenger’s side, remove the two A/C line bracket bolts, if your car has A/C.
•Unclamp the upper radiator hose. Don’t use vise grips to just hold the clamp open, slide it down about two inches down the hose. If the hose doesn’t come off easily, take a small screwdriver and gently insert and remove it around the circumfirence of the hose. This will help break the rubber free from the plastic and let you slide the hose off.
•Remove the resevoir tank. Just pull the tube off of the top of the radiator, and pull the tank up to slide it off of its bracket on the battery holder. You may need to move the battery a little to get it loose.
•If you have an automatic, you need to unclamp and remove two cooling lines coming off of the transmission. These lines have ATF running through them, not coolant, but if the car has sat for at least 2-3 hours there shouldn’t be much fluid in them. The lines should be removed from the topside, not down below, as the hoses are likely half-baked on to the radiator, and clearances make removing the clamps very difficult.
•Topside, the two hoses can be found running in front of two shifting solenoids on the transmission (little soup can-shaped things about as big around as a nickel). The hardline feeds for these lines are pretty long, so slide the clamps down a length about as long as your pinky finger. Do the line to your left first, then the line to your right (they’re slightly staggered and accessing these clamps is difficult unless you have small paddle-nosed vise grips or a purpose-made tool for removing hose clamps). Slide the hoses off of the hardlines - don’t worry about mixing them up, they’re different lengths (left long, right short).
•We still need to unclip three electrical connectors for the fans. The two on the condensor fan (driver’s side) are easy to remove, and only the top connector actually needs to be unplugged - the bottom one simply slides onto a bracket on the fan to keep the plugs from banging around, neither of the wires are actually connected to the fan. It was hard for me to get my hands down there to unclip everything, but I managed. If you have big arms/hands and can’t reach at this point, wait until you’ve lifted up the radiator a bit.
•The radiator fan’s electrical connector is located underneath the resevoir area. You may be able to reach it with the resevoir removed, but if not, just wait until the radiator has been pulled up a bit.
•At this point you should only have a steady drip coming out of the radiator. Get back underneath the car and replace the drain plug. You can try removing the lower radiator hose if the clip was installed with the tabs facing downward, but mine wasn’t so I had to do it after the following radiator fan step.
•If you have A/C, the radiator is not going to come out at this point. The radiator fan hits the A/C line, and I personally was not able to move the line enough without risking a break to get the motor housing past it. We need to remove the radiator fan separately, and then the rest of the radiator.
•Looking at the bottom of the radiator on the passenger side, you should see two (likely rusty) little 10mm bolts that attach to square nuts mounted in the radiator that hold down the bottom end of the radiator fan. Remove these bolts (I had to use needle-nose vise grips and a normal hand wrench to grab and turn them, there's no clearance for a socket) and if you have an automatic, make sure you’re removing the center-side bolt that holds down the lower left corner of the radiator fan- there’s another 10mm bolt close by that just holds down an A/C cooling line bracket.
•Get back topside and remove the two bolts from the top of the radiator fan. Pull up on the fan - you’ll note that the housing immediately bangs into the A/C line. Take this opportunity to unclip the electrical connector if you couldn’t reach it before.
•Getting the motor past the A/C line requires pushing on the line and moving the fan around strategically to squeeze it past. Be conscious of how hard you push the A/C line, it's not built to be very flexible. I pushed the line back while moving the fan up and towards the battery and managed to get it out.
•At this point you can remove the lower radiator hose if you couldn’t earlier. If the clip isn’t really on there up or down, you can rotate it to an easier-to-release position by using pliers up against the inner tab on the clip.
•I had to use the screwdriver-prying method, grabbing and wiggling, and pressing on opposite sides of the hose end with open needle-nose pliers from the underside of the car to get this hose loose. Be persistent, but be careful.
•After this hose is loose, the radiator can be pulled free of the car. Keep the radiator tipped towards you until you’re near your drain bucket - more coolant spill out from the lower hose connector if you’re not careful.
•Take a look at your nice clear working space for getting that mount out. At this point we need to have the engine supported.
•Move your jack with the support directly under the oil pan, as far to the passenger side as you can. Place a block of wood or a thick paperback book you don’t care about on top of the load support to distribute the load and give the pan a softer surface to rest on- you’ll likely bust your oil pan if you try to jack it up directly!
•Look at the valve cover area as you slowly jack up the engine. Once you see the top of the engine stop moving, you’ve raised the jack enough. Don’t start lifting up the whole front end by the engine!
•Now remove the three bracket-to-block bolts. The lower bolt is longer than the upper two- don’t get them mixed up.
•Remove the through bolt from the mount. I’d recommend using your torque wrench set to maximum rather than a breaker bar, as the ratcheting mechanism on the wrench will let you get the best leverage position. Give a good heave-ho towards the back of the car, and the through bolt should bust loose without much drama.
•The mount-to-frame bolts are the toughest. Get your breaker bar and extensions so you can lever right above the radiator frame area. Get the handle sticking out to the right or the left depending on if you push or pull better, hold on to the top of this goofy assembly with one hand and torque hard with the other. The frame bolt will probably make a loud crack! (you haven’t broken it) Repeat for all three frame bolts.
•Now place your new mount on the crossmember and hand-tighten the frame bolts. I have the Honda service manual for this car and they don’t mention ever removing this mount, just the bracket, so I set my wrench for about 55 lb/ft, which is the through-bolt rating plus ten pounds. I also used blue threadlocker on these bolts as a vibration safeguard.
•Put the through bolt back through the bracket and mount and hand-thread it into the bracket nut. Don’t put in the bracket-to-block bolts first - my front mount was completely broken (looked like a retarded St. Louis Arch and a mangled rubber twinkie when the pieces came out) so the engine positioning will likely be different!
•Torque the through bolt to 47 lb-ft.
•At this point, adjust the engine height so that the lower bracket bolt opening lines up with the threads on the block. It may look like the bracket and the block are now at completely impossible angles, but by threading in this bolt first, you’ll find that the bracket pulls back towards the upper bolt holes, allowing their installation.
•Tighten the bracket bolts in the aforementioned sequence (lower first, then upper) using a hand ratchet, then set-torque them at 28 lb-ft.
•You may have noticed that the bracket bolt holes are oval-shaped, not round, and that the bolts may now sit lower than when you first removed the bracket. These bracket bolts are all accessible with the radiator reassembled, so simply check to see if the engine has settled after the first few dozen miles and re-torque as necessary
•Installation is the reverse of removal. Radiator first, then the lower hose, then the fan, then everything else.
•At this point you need to refill and bleed your cooling system. This is a common process that you can look up somewhere else because I’m too lazy to tell you what you can have Google show you in five seconds
•Enjoy your new smooth, shudder-and-rattle-free ride!
--Fun tip: if you still have an RPM-dependent loud metallic rasping rattle from underneath your car, it's probably worn-out exhaust hardware. Order a spring-and-bolt set and a new exhaust gasket from Rock Auto for about 15 bucks.
Modified by Secret Chimp at 6:31 AM 9/27/2007
Modified by Secret Chimp at 11:15 AM 9/27/2007
Modified by Secret Chimp at 11:16 AM 9/27/2007
I didn't take pictures as I had no clue if I'd get any farther this time, but hopefully my steps make sense and others find this useful, as I pretty much had to discover this combination of documented methods myself.
Before you start, get your P.B. Blaster (if you don't have some, get some, Lowes and Home Depot carry it along with auto stores) and soak the three block-to-bracket bolts on the bracket just below the upper radiator hose, as well as both sides of the mount's through-bolt and the mount-to-crossmember bolts as best you can.
IMPORTANT NOTE: your front engine mount bracket has a nut WELDED to the driver’s hand side. You must access the bolt head from the passenger’s side to get it loose. No shortcuts with Honda!
•Get your car up in the air on your jackstands. If you have a nice big hydraulic jack instead of an AutoZone cheapie, don’t get it too high - we need to use that jack’s reach later to support the engine to get the mount loose.
• Remove the lower splash guard. Working from the passenger fender well, at the top edge there is a black plastic pop rivet you can pull out (and save) with some pliers, and then bolts running across the underside of the car, as well as an additional pop rivets and some well-hidden bolts in the upper corner of the guard on the driver's fender.
•Remove bolts towards the rear of the car. The splash guard tucks under another piece of plastic connected to the bumper - if you're unscrewing plastic screws underneath the front of the car, you're working too far forward. Once everything is unfastened, you should be able to pull the splash guard towards the back of the car and have it all fall out easily. If you're pulling even moderately hard, you've missed a bolt or a pop rivet. (If you’re wondering, you don’t need to remove the splash guard just to drain the radiator, but you to do get access to the radiator and fan bolts)
• At this point you have a theoretical option of only removing the radiator fan, or the option I actually took, which was removing the entire radiator. I have no idea if the clearances are OK with just the fan out, but you can try that first to save time. Just pick out the steps for removing the radiator fan and ignore the radiator removal instructions and the rest of the process should be the same.
•Radiator removal process:
Uncap the radiator. Get yourself a decent-sized bucket (a big Home Depot bucket is excessive and probably won't fit - only a gallon or so is going to come out here) and place it underneath the drain outlet in the center of the radiator’s underside. If the radiator drain plug is stuck, use pliers or needle-nose vise grips to help bust it loose.
The radiator will drizzle and drip for long time after the initial outflow, so move back up to the top of the car while the radiator is draining.
•Back on the top of the car, remove the two bolts for each of the cushion mounts on either corner of the radiator. On the driver’s side, remove the single bolt holding the wiring bracket to the corner of the radiator and condenser fan. On the passenger’s side, remove the two A/C line bracket bolts, if your car has A/C.
•Unclamp the upper radiator hose. Don’t use vise grips to just hold the clamp open, slide it down about two inches down the hose. If the hose doesn’t come off easily, take a small screwdriver and gently insert and remove it around the circumfirence of the hose. This will help break the rubber free from the plastic and let you slide the hose off.
•Remove the resevoir tank. Just pull the tube off of the top of the radiator, and pull the tank up to slide it off of its bracket on the battery holder. You may need to move the battery a little to get it loose.
•If you have an automatic, you need to unclamp and remove two cooling lines coming off of the transmission. These lines have ATF running through them, not coolant, but if the car has sat for at least 2-3 hours there shouldn’t be much fluid in them. The lines should be removed from the topside, not down below, as the hoses are likely half-baked on to the radiator, and clearances make removing the clamps very difficult.
•Topside, the two hoses can be found running in front of two shifting solenoids on the transmission (little soup can-shaped things about as big around as a nickel). The hardline feeds for these lines are pretty long, so slide the clamps down a length about as long as your pinky finger. Do the line to your left first, then the line to your right (they’re slightly staggered and accessing these clamps is difficult unless you have small paddle-nosed vise grips or a purpose-made tool for removing hose clamps). Slide the hoses off of the hardlines - don’t worry about mixing them up, they’re different lengths (left long, right short).
•We still need to unclip three electrical connectors for the fans. The two on the condensor fan (driver’s side) are easy to remove, and only the top connector actually needs to be unplugged - the bottom one simply slides onto a bracket on the fan to keep the plugs from banging around, neither of the wires are actually connected to the fan. It was hard for me to get my hands down there to unclip everything, but I managed. If you have big arms/hands and can’t reach at this point, wait until you’ve lifted up the radiator a bit.
•The radiator fan’s electrical connector is located underneath the resevoir area. You may be able to reach it with the resevoir removed, but if not, just wait until the radiator has been pulled up a bit.
•At this point you should only have a steady drip coming out of the radiator. Get back underneath the car and replace the drain plug. You can try removing the lower radiator hose if the clip was installed with the tabs facing downward, but mine wasn’t so I had to do it after the following radiator fan step.
•If you have A/C, the radiator is not going to come out at this point. The radiator fan hits the A/C line, and I personally was not able to move the line enough without risking a break to get the motor housing past it. We need to remove the radiator fan separately, and then the rest of the radiator.
•Looking at the bottom of the radiator on the passenger side, you should see two (likely rusty) little 10mm bolts that attach to square nuts mounted in the radiator that hold down the bottom end of the radiator fan. Remove these bolts (I had to use needle-nose vise grips and a normal hand wrench to grab and turn them, there's no clearance for a socket) and if you have an automatic, make sure you’re removing the center-side bolt that holds down the lower left corner of the radiator fan- there’s another 10mm bolt close by that just holds down an A/C cooling line bracket.
•Get back topside and remove the two bolts from the top of the radiator fan. Pull up on the fan - you’ll note that the housing immediately bangs into the A/C line. Take this opportunity to unclip the electrical connector if you couldn’t reach it before.
•Getting the motor past the A/C line requires pushing on the line and moving the fan around strategically to squeeze it past. Be conscious of how hard you push the A/C line, it's not built to be very flexible. I pushed the line back while moving the fan up and towards the battery and managed to get it out.
•At this point you can remove the lower radiator hose if you couldn’t earlier. If the clip isn’t really on there up or down, you can rotate it to an easier-to-release position by using pliers up against the inner tab on the clip.
•I had to use the screwdriver-prying method, grabbing and wiggling, and pressing on opposite sides of the hose end with open needle-nose pliers from the underside of the car to get this hose loose. Be persistent, but be careful.
•After this hose is loose, the radiator can be pulled free of the car. Keep the radiator tipped towards you until you’re near your drain bucket - more coolant spill out from the lower hose connector if you’re not careful.
•Take a look at your nice clear working space for getting that mount out. At this point we need to have the engine supported.
•Move your jack with the support directly under the oil pan, as far to the passenger side as you can. Place a block of wood or a thick paperback book you don’t care about on top of the load support to distribute the load and give the pan a softer surface to rest on- you’ll likely bust your oil pan if you try to jack it up directly!
•Look at the valve cover area as you slowly jack up the engine. Once you see the top of the engine stop moving, you’ve raised the jack enough. Don’t start lifting up the whole front end by the engine!
•Now remove the three bracket-to-block bolts. The lower bolt is longer than the upper two- don’t get them mixed up.
•Remove the through bolt from the mount. I’d recommend using your torque wrench set to maximum rather than a breaker bar, as the ratcheting mechanism on the wrench will let you get the best leverage position. Give a good heave-ho towards the back of the car, and the through bolt should bust loose without much drama.
•The mount-to-frame bolts are the toughest. Get your breaker bar and extensions so you can lever right above the radiator frame area. Get the handle sticking out to the right or the left depending on if you push or pull better, hold on to the top of this goofy assembly with one hand and torque hard with the other. The frame bolt will probably make a loud crack! (you haven’t broken it) Repeat for all three frame bolts.
•Now place your new mount on the crossmember and hand-tighten the frame bolts. I have the Honda service manual for this car and they don’t mention ever removing this mount, just the bracket, so I set my wrench for about 55 lb/ft, which is the through-bolt rating plus ten pounds. I also used blue threadlocker on these bolts as a vibration safeguard.
•Put the through bolt back through the bracket and mount and hand-thread it into the bracket nut. Don’t put in the bracket-to-block bolts first - my front mount was completely broken (looked like a retarded St. Louis Arch and a mangled rubber twinkie when the pieces came out) so the engine positioning will likely be different!
•Torque the through bolt to 47 lb-ft.
•At this point, adjust the engine height so that the lower bracket bolt opening lines up with the threads on the block. It may look like the bracket and the block are now at completely impossible angles, but by threading in this bolt first, you’ll find that the bracket pulls back towards the upper bolt holes, allowing their installation.
•Tighten the bracket bolts in the aforementioned sequence (lower first, then upper) using a hand ratchet, then set-torque them at 28 lb-ft.
•You may have noticed that the bracket bolt holes are oval-shaped, not round, and that the bolts may now sit lower than when you first removed the bracket. These bracket bolts are all accessible with the radiator reassembled, so simply check to see if the engine has settled after the first few dozen miles and re-torque as necessary
•Installation is the reverse of removal. Radiator first, then the lower hose, then the fan, then everything else.
•At this point you need to refill and bleed your cooling system. This is a common process that you can look up somewhere else because I’m too lazy to tell you what you can have Google show you in five seconds
•Enjoy your new smooth, shudder-and-rattle-free ride!
--Fun tip: if you still have an RPM-dependent loud metallic rasping rattle from underneath your car, it's probably worn-out exhaust hardware. Order a spring-and-bolt set and a new exhaust gasket from Rock Auto for about 15 bucks.
Modified by Secret Chimp at 6:31 AM 9/27/2007
Modified by Secret Chimp at 11:15 AM 9/27/2007
Modified by Secret Chimp at 11:16 AM 9/27/2007
09-27-2007, 09:48 AM
#4
Re: How To: Change your 94-97's front engine mount (oem_certified_accord)
I'll take pics when I do my exhaust this weekend. I'm not taking anything apart, but everything to be removed is still visible when assembled.
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