Howto: Replacing Front Engine Mount on Acura TL

Looking around online it seems that bad engine mounts seem pretty common on my car (2002 Acura TL Type S).  Most people were saying their mounts went bad around 60K to 100K miles.  I have almost 177K on mine, so surely mine must be shot as well, I thought.

This does explain some symptoms I was seeing with oscillations in the drive train in certain conditions, and wheel hop under hard acceleration.  Looking at the DIY steps it seemed like something we would be able to tackle ourselves and save a ton of money, so I decided to order some new engine mounts and give it a try.

Of course right off the bat I went cheap and got the set of five engine mounts made by DEA for $130. This includes the front and rear engine mounts that are supposed to be hydraulic just like the OEM mounts (their stiffness can be adjusted via a vacuum line), side engine mount, and two transmission mounts.  What a deal, I could replace all of them and be in tip top shape.

With DIY from acurazine.com in hand, we started the project.  The first thing to do is move the hood strut mount on the driver's side to the secondary position to hold the hood up higher for more room to work:

Now we jack up the car and place it on jack stands.  I'm still not 100% sure about jack stand placement because everyone online disagrees about it, but jacking up from the front cross member and placing the jack stands under the side jack mounts seems to work OK.  Then, we support the engine with a couple of jacks using 2x4s to spread out the pressure on the engine and avoid pushing a jack through the oil pan:

Now we take a look in the engine bay.  Wow, things are tight.  We removed the heat shield over the exhaust manifold to get a little more space to work in.  We're definitely going to need the new u-joints we just got.  First we get under the car and loosen the lower two bolts on the bracket that connects to the engine:

Looking up from the bottom of the car.  Mount is at the bottom of
the picture, engine/transmission at the top. Vacuum line is seen connected
to the bottom of the mount.

Surprisingly, the bolts aren't too hard to break loose, which is good because the only tool we can get to fit on them are some small wrenches.  Next we see what we can loosen from the top.  Here is where the u-joints come in handy.  The third bolt on the engine bracket has the main engine mount bolt in the way, and a u-joint and extension let us loosen it from a comfortable position:

At this time we adjusted the pressure from the two jacks under the car to make sure there was no pressure from the engine on the mount.  In retrospect it would be better to loosen the top bolt of the mount and do this first before backing out the bracket bolts.

Now we loosen the top mount bolt and the four bottom bolts using my new impact wrench:

One of the four bolts holding the engine mount to the crossmember.

Brian and I start laughing our butts off after the first bolt comes out in seconds, and wonder why we didn't buy one of these sooner.  The last bolt is back under the exhaust manifold and barely even visible from the top, but with the u-joint and a couple of strategically placed extensions, it easily reaches the bolt and the impact wrench spins it right off:

The last and hardest bolt to get to.

Removing the vacuum line took some yanking and I thought I was going to break something, but it finally came off the mount.  After some finagling, the mount barely squeezes out like the engine bay was giving birth to it:

Wow that battery terminal is corroded.

At this point I ran into a bit of trouble.  First of all, none of the new mounts looked like the mount that came out.  I'm OK with that but a little uneasy.  Second, while at first glance I thought the new front and rear mounts were identical, I now realize that they are slightly different and they are not labelled.

This is the point where I go outside, sit down on Brian's porch, and start googling with my phone.  Partly to get some fresh air and partly because his home comes with a Faraday cage around the garage and I have no signal at all.

After a bunch of googling, we figure out which mount is the front and squeeze it down into place along with the bracket.  We have to jack up the engine a bit for the holes to line up.  Some of the bolts we can get into place from the top, and some I let my brother crawl under the car and take care of, and put the vacuum line in place:

Thanks bro!

Using the extensions and u-joints, we tighten the top mount nut to 40 ft-lbs as the specs call for.  The bracket's bolts are supposed to be 28 ft-lbs, but we find there is really no way to get a torque wrench on any of them.  I tighten them to "redneck" ft-lbs via a wrench, and then precisely tighten the bottom bolts to 30 ft-lbs, despite the fact that I pulled that figure right out of my rear end because I couldn't find the specs for it.  If anyone knows, please let me know and I'll fix that right up.

Oh yeah, this is the part where I started developing fumble fingers so let me back up a little bit - it didn't go quite that smooth.  I dropped a bolt down into the bumper area where it got caught somewhere unreachable and we had to remove the entire front bumper to get it out.

So, I read online to drive the car, then come back and re-torque the bolts.  I figured I would leave the heat shield off for this and let me tell you, engines heat up real quick.  After a drive down the street and back, the engine was many hundreds of degrees, making getting the heat shield back on a bit problematic.

Now I started dropping wrenches.  The first time it fell down onto the plastic splash guard behind the bumper. I reached down and realized I was going to get burned on the hot parts, so I figured I'd reach up from under the car and quickly jammed my hand right into the hot exhaust pipe.  Wow, that hurt! The next day my wife saw my blister had popped and was leaking down my thumb and said it was "gross", so I knew I had gotten a good and proper manly injury.

We did get the heat shield back on, and the motor hasn't fallen out of the car yet so that's good.  However, I seem to have a bit of vibrations at idle so I'm not sure that the hydraulic function is working.  After some reading online, it seems that with the cheap DEA mounts sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes the vacuum port is a dummy and not even hooked up to anything, so it's a crap shoot what you get.  On the plus side, the old mount was definitely shot and the engine feels more stable during acceleration and shifting now.  We'll see how it holds up.

One mount down, four to go.  I hear the rear is the hardest so that should be pretty epic when we get to it.