Just got caught up on most of the thread! Looks GREAT! Way faster than my 3 year long build now. I'm going to check out your wiring harness video tonight! If I can strip mine back and make it work with my setup that would be HUGE!
Also how to you make motor mounts for the ALH in your TJ?
Thanks
Grant
Nice glad you saw the thread, it’s only going quick because I had a few weeks off in March to get about 8 hours of work in each day. Plus a whole lot of planning and parts ordering in the previous months!
I tried to make the wiring harness video as comprehensive as possible, there are a few other videos on YouTube about the harness, but they are slightly disorganized. I hope if anyone reading needs help on it at any point they will reach out, I’d be glad to talk about the harness. I do not think the harness was challenging at all, but I understand the desire of many to not want to deal with DIYing it.
Ive discussed in another thread about making an Arduino CAN bus reader that will interface with the Jeep stock gauge cluster, ill get on that eventually but I’ll need to get it driving first.
For the engine truss, I started by basically bolting up the engine/trans/tcase and putting on the rear trans mount to the skid plate ( all this post body lift install) then using my engine hoist to hold the front of the engine in place. This locate the engine longitudinally or front and back, then i shifted the drivetrain assembly towards passenger side an inch or two, whatever the factory offset is.
I welded two brackets to the frame, and made a sturdy steel crossmember that is bolted to the frame brackets with two gusseted flat “landing pads”.
These landing pads are spaced wide enough that it won't allow a large amount of torsional movement on the engine under load, basically as wide as possible on the new crossmember.
The hydraulic engine mounts/dampers both then bolt to the removable crossmember, those dampers then bolt to a simple A shaped truss which in turn bolts directly to the factory VW pendulum mount bracket only.
This picture hopefully shows you what it all looked like before I started gusseting up the mount components
Some day I will replace the A truss/VW bracket with an all steel single piece truss, but I trust this configuration will hold for now. This took me about two or three days to fab up, which compared to the typical side mount engine mounts was much easier to set up and fabricate. many have been successful both ways however. Cotybuilt sells the truss type engine mount and tdconversions sells side type engine mount brackets.
I also did some back of the napkin calculations on the extra stress on the bell housing from mounting in this configuration, I don’t know what I did with those calculations but the extra amount of stress did not seem significant , time will tell though on testing.