Motor Mount Replacement, and several other things "while I was in there"

The GTS baffle is the lower piece of sheet aluminum. I created the upper piece to compliment the GTS baffle, probably a waste of time that will create some unexpected problem making me sorry I messed with it.

My thought was that the GTS baffle left a gap to the sides of the oil pickup even though the pan shape reduced slosh in a forward direction and the baffle reduced it in a reverse direction. I did the drill and tap all 8 bosses with metric threads to stay "pure".

Adam asked about measuring the rod bearings when I mentioned before that I was replacing them. It seemed like a good idea even though I had no reason to suspect problems. At $0.95 per strip plastigage is a steal so why not. You can see (barely) one of the measurements here on an old bearing. The gauge slot that matches is 0.076mm. My bearings came out as 0.051, 0.051, 0.051, 0.063, 0.051, 0.063, 0.063, 0.063 for cylinders 1-8 respectively. The new bearing (I measured one for curiousity's sake) came out at 0.051. The specs are 0.02 to 0.07 for new bearings and 0.1mm as the wear limit. All in all I was happy to see the originals were in good shape and for the small cost and effort (as Mark predicted) it seemed good to replace them.
Every project needs a focal point for fear and swearing so for this one it was this galled pan bolt. It broke off (I knew it was going to from the feel, but no lubing or gentle handling helped) so getting the pan out was no big deal, but getting the stub out was disturbing. You can see on the left that there was about 1/4" protruding so on the right you can see a nut screwed onto the stub and welded in place. The bolt in the picture to the right of the broken one was there to hold the sheet metal heat shield in. I rigged up the shield to keep the torch heat away from all the internal engine bits and all the accessory stuff nearby.

No device I own had the clamping power to hold the stub without slipping so the welded nut was needed. I think the heat of the weld was the biggest factor in getting it to turn. I could still feel the galling grip for about 2 more full turns as it came out, then it began to turn freely as a bolt should. I ran a tap through the threads of course after all the carnage was over.

These are the rear, middle and front (crossover) sections of Louie's exhaust design. The mufflers fit between the rear and middle sections and the CATs fit between the middle and front sections. The front section is the Ott X crossover where the real design magic lives, the other sections are just neccessary plumbing to get the gasses out from under the car. The front section in this case looks more like the MD(Martian Derriere). This was a tight fit because the headers and CATs combine to leave very little room for plumbing especially when trying to get the flow paths to blend at the desired shallow angle. Louie's work results in a set of dimentions for cross section, common flow path length and angle of entrance and exit that seem to create some healthy gains in output. The crossover and header support bracket in the right hand photo are ceramic coated to match the headers and help keep as much heat as possible in the exhaust gasses and out of the engine and other items under the hood.


The finished Ott X exhaust system with Devek State II headers on a lift. On the right is the finished Ott X and middle section of the exhaust painted and ready to mount to the headers and rear section. The O2 sensor is much easier to get to with this arrangement and the air line for the cats (visible in the lower right pic) is a stainless flex tube which made for easier installation. The middle and rear sections were just painted with high temp paint.