Continuing from my interior work we’re moving back out to the engine bay.
First up was the motor mount situation. The original 76' 350 pontiac the car had had a 3 holes for the motor mount. The new 65' 389 going into the car only has 2 holes for the mount and they are in a completely different spot than the 350.
So with some backyard engineering a new mount was designed that would allow the new motor to sit in the same location as the old one.
Made out of some really thick square tubing. These thinks won’t give up easily.
Test fitting the mounts. As of right now they don’t make any polyurathane mounts for Pontiac cars. However I was able to buy some from some 90's Chevy v8 and then modify them to fit the Pontiac mounts.
After some edge cleanup and paint.
Engine is permanently mounted and sitting rock-solid. Really happy with how these turned out.
Now with the engine mounted in the correct spot we can move on to the next issue; the brake booster touching the valve covers.
This is because of the roller rocker arms I’m running I had to raise the valve covers up with a spacer to avoid interference. but this of course had it’s own set of issues as they were now touching the booster.
Luckily I had just scrapped a 90's Chevy 3500 van so I just happened to have a hydrobooster laying around.
The hydrobooster would give me tonnes of space but it also came with some issues of it’s own.
Main issue was the mounting plate which didn’t fit the firebird at all.
But after some small modification
It fit like a charm
The hydrobooster also eliminates another problem I’ve had. With the old engine I ran such a hot cam so I almost never had any vacuum for brakes when I needed it. With the new motor I’m running an even hotter cam so I didn’t expect the vacuum to be any better. A hydrobooster eliminates this problem altogether and I can run it of the original power steering pump so the hp loss will be minimal.