The Mighty Merc – Trans/Doubler Cross Member Fun!

Given how often I seem to be working on my wheelers, I wanted to makes sure that the cross member and skids plates that I come up with are easily removable for service, don’t hinder routine inspection/fluid changes, and don’t weigh 200 lbs each. So I went for a bit more of a minimalist approach this time around.

I ran into my first roadblock before I even started. It quickly became apparent that my rear most NP205 mount was not going to work as intended due to it hanging down so low. I wanted to make sure that I had some sort of rear mount to help support the doubler since it’s not exactly lightweight. I have some nightmares of the whole assembly breaking off the transmission tail housing.

So step 1 was creating a plate that tied the transmission and doubler together. Step 2 was creating a flexible offset torque mount off my original NP 205 mount:

And here is it with the mounts installed:

With those critical parts in place, the actual cross member itself was a pretty simple affair:

And here is the whole mess installed into the Mercury. You can see in the background that I am utilizing one of the stock cross member brackets for the new bracket. The other mounts just bolt to some plates I welded to the frame:

Now to figure out how to actually shift this whole mess…