Finishing the Trans Mount

Each day is an adventure and we are nearly ready to get to Built by Bones to fab our cage. The final step to getting up to the cage shop is to finish up our transmission mount. We managed to make some great progress on that over the past couple weeks but it has been slower than anticipated. Previously we wrote up an entry on the fabrication of the mount itself. Now lets see the rest of this process.

The next step we had to do was to our Urethane into the mount in order to create our Bushing. This required the development of a mold for the mount so we could pour urethane directly into the mount. We started out with a piece of Teflon.

We cut out some circles from the flat piece of teflon and turned them into a cap that simply press fit onto the existing mount. These caps have a small tab that locate the center tube as well so everything stays centered.

With the caps made we bolted them up to the trans mount and centered them in order to prepare for the pour. Then we clamped it up so we could pour the urethane in on a stable platform.

At that point we were introduced to this thing that John Grimberg calls “math.” Apparently this magical collection of numbers and funny signs can tell you things like “volume” and “ratios.” So we ended up mixing up our Urethane then vacuumed it to get all the air bubbles out. Finally we injected it into the mold with an oversized syringe.

After that there was just a wait. When the mold came off unfortunately there was a big bubble that had formed and part of the urethane was ruined. However that was still perfectly suitable for mounting up our tabs and to be honest, it would probably work regardless. So we mounted everything up, and tacked on our mounting tabs.

With it all tacked up we flipped the chassis and got a nice solid weld on the tabs.

Finally, it was all mounted up and ready to go. We’re psyched with this thing. Initially it was a bit of work, but now I think we’ve got it all nailed down so it is reasonably simple to work with.

The bolt that holds the trans in now has an access hole through the side as well so it will be very easy to service in the field.

Thanks for following along! Check out some of our previous posts as well!