Honda Insight Repair and Upgrade Blog by Mike

I updated the Insight pack removal and disassembly pages so that they would print correctly. Basically I just adjusted the picture size and text spacings. Printers should be set to landscape and .5″ margins on all 4 sides.

Honda calls this mount a rear engine mount. I call it a transmission mount. In any case, I had to replace it with a factory new part so that the clutch wouldn’t chatter so badly. It worked very well!! The clutch engagement is far smoother than it’s ever been. Ran about $97usd.

Sometime around November or December 2011, the motor mount repair I made using the Loctite Polyurethane PL Window, Door and Siding Sealant from Home Depot had worked very well for about a year or slightly less, then failed. As you can see by the pic, the urethane does not apply very smoothly. It’s very sticky coming out of the tube. A urethane that flows out of the tube like most home caulking compounds do, would yield nicer looking results. The old urethane had cracked straight through were the rubber had originally cracked. It was still very well stuck to the original rubber every where it was still attached.

This time around I used something like 2-3 times more urethane to repair the broken leg of each mount and to add support to the reverse gear part of the mount. The tube of urethane was around a year old. It took some digging to clear out the outlet. Last time I cured it under an incandescent light bulb. This time I only had compact flourescent. It was not nearly as warm. It cured for about 20 hours, then I drove it carefully out of the garage and into an outside parking space where I let it set until the next day. Currently as of mid March 2012, the mount is working great. It’s a bit too stiff as there is some vibration added to the rear of the interior and the car over all during very specific rpm’s. There is more vibration conducted to the car chassis with this stiffer mount as I let the clutch out. But it does work far better than a broken mount.

I’ve thought about machining out all of the old rubber, then filling it in with a smooth flowing urethane, then machining the grooves just like the factory mount had in it. We’ll see how long this one lasts.

Here is the rear motor mount with Loctite Polyurethane PL Window, Door and Siding Sealant from Home Depot. I found a post in a Honda-Tech thread that a guy tried it and liked it’s vibration isolation characteristics better than the 3M Window Weld Urethane. The bridge added to the top section should really help the clutch chattering when in reverse. I made the repair late at night. Too late to notice that the urethane was white instead of black. Gray is the closest color they offer to black.