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.

Since the urethane added to the mount was only cured for 40 hours when I test drove the Insight today, I was a bit nervous that it would not be cured enough to withstand the test drives. But it worked. It does not respond so harshly to having a chattering clutch with the motor mount repair/improvement that I made with the Loctite Urethane from Home Depot. I tested the worst case situation for the motor mount over by my mail box. The driveway there is a bit steep. I usually have to back out of it going up hill. Backing up this hill made the engine shake thunderously due to the worn out rear motor mount. But now it feels as though the clutch is still chattering, but the whole engine and chassis are not responding to the chattering any longer. I could back up the Insight at far lower rpm and still get a fairly smooth motion out of the car considering the clutch chatter. Now the test will be to see how long the urethane mod lasts. The cure time is 7 days. I’m hoping that setting it to cure under a 100w incandescent lap helped to shorten the cure time. In fact the lamp browned the white urethane just a little on the surface. The center bushing and the mount itself was quite hot after sitting over night under the 100w bulb. Those inefficient bulbs sure make for easy curing ovens. So I think this repair/mod of the rear motor mount was a worthy improvement for general reasons, but specifically for helping tame the clutch chattering so many of us have. I knew the mount was stiffer as I could not tilt the engine up and down with my hand while laying under the car. It was located far more firmly. I could not tell that any more vibration was added to the chassis by making this mount a little stiffer. The car still feels smooth and quiet as far as vibrations are concerned.

The car seems smooth on acceleration since I’ve cleaned out the egr plate. I’ll still swap out the egr valves to see if they produce any noticeable change in driving feel. I also put a bunch of missing screws back into the under chassis aerodynamic panels. They cost a bit from Honda.

I saw that there was some room for a screwdriver to pry the crankshaft dampener away from the engine to help check for end play. Pushing the crank back in will be tougher.