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Old April 30th 2010, 15:40
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Post Urethane Transmission Mounts

by Rob van Brandenburg
Nov 09, 2003

This article will describe how to replace the OEM transmission mounts with ones made from urethane. Urethane is a material that is stronger and less flexible than rubber, so it should keep the tranny more firmer in place than the stock rubber mounts. In this case, the installation is done on a 1970 Standard Beetle.

Here is the complete kit. It comes with the 2 rear mounts, the front mount, all the nuts, bolts and washers you need, and the sleeves that go in the bushings.



Step 1

Remove the engine from the car. You will need to get access to the bolts that hold the rear mounts. These bolts are inside the bellhousing, so the only way to get to it is by removing the engine.



Step 2

You probably would start with the rear mounts ... DON’T. I found out that you will need to move the tranny back in order to replace the front mount. So let’s start at the front. First disconnect the shift coupler. Inside the car, under the rear bench is a cover. Remove the cover and you will see the shift coupler. Remove the small lockscrew that sticks up from the back off the coupler. This will allow you to move the tranny back. Don’t let the screw fall into the tunnel!



Step 3

Now you are ready to loosen the front mount. There are 4 nuts that need to come off. Again the wirebrush and WD40 will come in handy. The front mount has a ‘hump’ in it that sticks through the hole of the bracket. You cannot see it in this picture because you are looking at the rear of the mount, and the ‘hump’ is in the front. So the only way to remove the mount is by pulling the tranny back. Take off the 4 nuts and leave the tranny sitting for now.



Step 4

Now you need to loosen / remove the rear tranny crossbrace. Place a jack under the tranny, and loosen the 2 big bolts using a 27MM socket. Now pull the tranny back far enough to take out the front mount.



Step 5

Here you see the difference between the old and the new mount. Although the original mount looks beefier, and even has a metal mounting plate, you can feel how much stiffer the urethane is compared to the rubber. Plus that the red look so much better than the black. Put the sleeves that came with the kit in the holes of the mount, then put washers on both ends. This might be a bit tricky. I found it the easiest by putting the washers in at an angle and put a large bold on them and whack it with a hammer. Crude, but effective. Here you can see the ‘hump’ I was talking about earlier. The new mount does not have one.



Step 6

Now we can install the front mount. First attach the mount to the tranny and then slide the tranny forward. Before you push the tranny back into position, make sure the shift-coupler is lined up properly. Put the 2 large bolts back in the rear crossmember, but don’t tighten them yet. The kit comes with 4 new bolts for the mount, however, I was unable to remove the outer 2 bolts from the frame. They were part of the bracket. This meant that I did not have a lot of thread to work with, but I got the nuts on anyway.

This also meant that I could not reattach the ground strap so I removed it from the front off the tranny and moved it to the rear. After cleaning the tabs and the frame/tranny point where it attaches, I put on some anti-oxidant and mounted the strap to the bolt of the rear tranny mount.



Step 7

Moving to the rear, remove the 4 nuts that hold each rear mount. The ones on the inside should remove easily, because they lived in a ‘greasy’ environment. The outside nuts could be harder to remove. I cleaned them up with a wirebrush (mounted on a drill), then sprayed them with WD40 and they came right off.



Step 8

Again place a jack under the tranny and remove the rear crossmember. You can now take off the mounts.



Step 9

Here you see the difference between the old and the new mount. The old mount has a metal plate and the inside bolts are part of the mount. The new mounts are all urethane and all the bolts are separate. This means that you first have to fasten them to the tranny, and then to the crossbrace, because when the mounts are on the brace you can’t hold the inside bolt while you are fastening the nut inside the bellhousing.



Step 10

Here is where I ran into a problem. Because I had to attach the mounts to the bellhousing first, the bolts did not line up with the brace. This is because of the angle of the bolts. You can see on the left side of the picture that the holes do line up, but because the bolt can not be pushed back for install, and because of the angle of the bolt, it won’t fit.

After some thinking I came up with this MacGyver solution. I wedged a hammer between the brace and the mount to force the brace outward. I then took a clamp and clamped the brace to the tranny to make sure the hammer would stay put. Using another hammer, I banged against the bottom of the brace while fastening the clamp. This way I could force the brace up and out until the holes lined up with the bolts. I then pulled the ‘wedge’ out, and bolted up the mounts.



Conclusion

And there you have it. I’m guessing those shiny red parts alone add at least 5HP Don’t forget to torque the bolts of the brace, and put the lockscrew back in the shift coupler.

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mounts, tranny, transmission, urethane


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