CATEGORIES FOR ARTICLE LINKS BELOW

Removing the Acura RL Sub Frame Mounts

After much brainstorming on how to mount the sub frame, a friend of mine came by and asked why not just use the mounts from the RL?  It seemed like such an obvious solution but I figured they were grafted into the main frame and not removable.  Well I was wrong!

The sub frame mounts are actually built into a mount that is spot welded to the two main beams that run up either side of the engine compartment.  I decided to remove the passenger side mount and see how feasible it was going to be to fabricate something on the civic chassis and swap it over.  Now you would think you just drill out some spot welds in 10 minuets and out it comes.  I will tell you right now that description is not even close.  If you have never drilled out spot welds and removed them, then let me tell you it’s not easy.  I spent over an hour getting this out and went through 3 drill bits even though I was going at a very slow speed with cutting oil.  Spot weld metal is obviously much harder than the metal around it, so is just waiting to chew up and spit out your drill bits.

Getting the other mount out ended up being just as tough and take just as much time.  I thought it would go faster having learned something the first time, but the spot welds have annealed the metal to be SO HARD!

So now what?  Well obviously they don’t just line right up on the civic chassis.  I can already see the chassis itself is going to take some major cutting and boxing out to even slide them onto the rails.  Even then they will not be at the right height so the mounts themselves will have to be heavily modified.  Also I have run into some other problems.  To make it easy to follow lets list some problems I have found already:

Problems so far:
1.  Rear sub frame mounts line up on top of fuel lines.
2.  Front frame rails won’t accommodate RL sub frame mounts
3.  Sub frame Mounts from RL are too long and will position the sub frame too low
4.  Lower control arms bolt to the sub frame so sub frame position is more important than one thinks.  I must line up the sub frame to:
            a.  Line up wheels in center of wheel well.
            b.  Line up lower A-arm with upper A-arm at a proper 2-3 degree caster angle.
c.  By raising and lowering the sub frame I am setting up ride height, but also setting up the camber curve as the suspension travels through its arc of motion.  Ride height can be adjusted by coil-overs but as all of the “STANCE” or “stretch and poke” scene knows your just moving through the pre set camber arc faster causing your static camber to dramatically increase.  We want to avoid that since adjusting camber with camber plates works but you then lose the camber arc you setup in your A arm mounting points and lengths.
5.  The rear motor mount is directly in front of the heater core.   I build street cars not track cars, so this is going to have to be dealt with.  The car HAS to have heat and I really want it to have A/C as well.

This is what I have found so far.  Can’t even imagine how long this list is going to be by the end of it all.

I have also started removing the rear sub frame mounts off the RL chassis.  If these do end up getting used they are going to require even more modification than the front mounts.