During the previous post I was starting to remove the intake arm box to remove the fender, and I so happened to look past the arm and spot something on the gear chassis mount I wish I hadn't spotted..

Yep, the mount had started tearing off of the chassis leg. There are 2 spot welds on the back corner to the leg, and it's torn the leg around them and started to lift upwards, which is due to the motor torquing forward. This looks promising to be the contributing cause to this load rotational noise I've been hearing the past few track days from the passenger side. With this mount moving, it must be enough to push the engine/gearbox to the left and must be rubbing on something or straining something rotational.

Amusingly once I saw this I wasn't too concerned, some whom I told were concerned and said it's time to move everything into the EF9 shell. But if we think about what the car has gone through on the track, without a front gearbox mount, I somewhat just accepted it.

5 minutes prior I was looking at the engine bay thinking I'd love to respray this to tidy it up, and with now seeing this, I decided immediately it was time to remove the engine. This would also be goood as the clutch/flywheel combo I used from the DA9, at the time they were already extremely worn with the flywheel having 3 burn marks go through to the other side, but at the time I had no more money for a new clutch/flywheel setup. And hey, they lasted this long!

With that, I started preparing everything to remove the engine, which luckily isn't a lot. This would also tie in with me wanting to redo my engine loom, it's the original DA9 OBD1 loom which I routed a few things differently, but the electrical tape was starting to peel in a few areas, and I felt it could be routed a bit better along with moving the strut top fuse box in car.

Engine removal

That weekend my dad and brother came to help remove the motor & gearbox. As I had already prepped everything during the week, we could get straight into it first thing, and we had it out in no time!.

Closer inspection on the chassis leg

With the heart of the Civic removed we were able to get a better look at the damage. It's definitely done some damage, even tearing up the side at the base of the strut tower. The sealant has then cracked along the top edge whilst it's been pulling the metal out, as the engine torques up. The main part around the mount has also bent outwards towards the passenger side, so it'll need to be hit back in first.

Repairs

You can see in one of the photos above where the engine was on the crane, my dad had already jumped into the bay to start hitting it back in place. I had to stop him just to get some photos. With some gentle massaging he managed to get the section which had been pulled out back level with the rest of the chassis leg.

With the panel beating done, it was time to weld. It was a bit tricky to get into the corner against the base of the strut tower, as I wanted to put in some support welds. So what started off as a few small welds then changed into lets just weld the entire thing and then grind it down later into a new layer, this is mainly around the back right corner.

Welding on the upright angle isn't my strong point, as the weld tries to fall down due to gravity.. Oh well, she'll grind down nicely in the end.

Went and bought a Milwaukee belt sander as this would be the perfect candidate for the job! Also got this small LED light so assist with going up underneath the dash, I'm sick of trying to hold my phone with the torch on.

I mainly grinded down the back right section I mentioned before, you can see the belt sander actually works perfect for this location. As I went along, I added a few more welds to help even things out.

In addition, I went around the rest of this gearbox mount and then other sides engine mount with some small stitch welds. I'm not sure if doing the 3 small ones around the base tabs of the mounts was necessary, I didn't want to get too close to the edge in case it blew out as they just turned into little lump welds.

Other engine bay repairs

Years ago when doing the DA9 booster install, my mate and I had some issues removing the original booster. I was still a rookie, and with him doing one before he went under the dash to undo whatever was required to be taken off so we could remove the booster. We were struggling to get it out, then using pry bars to try pry it out. He went back under the dash and found there was still f1 nut holding the booster on. Unfortunately this damaged this lip of the firewall.

I've never been bothered to fix, but now is the perfect time. Dad went about reforming the correct shape it should be. You'll have to wait for photos in a future post of the finished product, I forgot to take some at the time. He managed to get it pretty close to perfect, but with the metal starting to stretch we didn't take it too far.

When I did the engine bay respray during the motorswap I used bog to fill up a few random holes. It was my first, and probably my last time using bog. Some bits cracked over the years at the track, so I went about removing all the bog to expose the holes again. It was only around both strut towers I did the bog.

And thats the engine bay metal prep! Now to remove everything else and prep for paint.