The Lone Ranger – Stock Motor Mount Modification

I picked this trick up somewhere, but I cannot find the original thread that I saw it in. In a nutshell, I wanted a cheap/quick way to firm up the stock mounts, and help give them a chance to survive the extra forces they’ll see form the doubler. If these wind up not working out for me, I’ll swap them out with the Ruff Stuff Mounts that I have sitting here. I’m just tired of the detail work right now, and was looking for a quick project to check off the list.

So, take your stock motor mount (mine were still tight, so I didn’t buy new ones):

Take and angle grinder to the rivet head, push the rivet remains out of their home, and slap a 3/8” bolt in its place.

Once the bolt is in place, snug it up some and either weld/secure the nut to the bolt to keep them from loosening up. The goal here is to make it a “tighter” mount than what it was with just the rivet in there. I could move my stock rivets around a good 1/32 – 1/16” when playing around with them.

EDIT: Yeah that didn’t pan out. The tired 4.0 (in 2 high never the less) managed to start pulling the bolt through the mount, so I had to swap them out for some stock mounts. My hope is that the stock rivet has enough surface area to keep it all together as opposed to the smaller (weaker?) bolt/washer combo I had.

Bolt being pulled through:

Stock Mounts:

Edit again: The stock mounts seem to be holding together better than my ‘bolt’ through ones did. However, most of the symptoms that I’m seeing are caused from steep gears I’m was running (4:10’s and 37″ tires). When I slapped in the 4.88 gears, it helped things out tremendously.