After years of racing, I decided the best way to mount the Chevy motor in my Hudson, would be using a plate, just like sprintcars use. After all the tumbles and flips those Sprintcars take, I've never seen a motor come unbolted.  Instead of being bolted solid to the frame, and vibrating me to death, I cut the rings off of some shock absorbers, welded the rings into the plate, and installed urethane bushings. This picture shows the plate being built. The line, running through the picture, is a plumb-line I used to make sure everything was centered and straight. I got a bad motor from the junkyard, gutted it to make it lighter, and used the "dummy motor" for the initial fit. When I did this project, I hadn't heard of Eastwood yet. I wish I had, and I would have used one of their "dummy motors", which would have been about 300lbs. lighter!

The plate is 95% finished here. All I needed to do was drill 2 more holes, through the bottom "ears".

While I was building the motor plate, I also dropped the crossmember 2 and 3/4 inches, to allow room for the oversized tranny pan on the 700R-4. The square plate on the left, will be a combination rear motor/transmission mount. You can see on the top right, I already had the car converted to 4 wheel disc, and had installed a dual-action mastercylinder, in the original location. I made the mastercylinder bracket out of 1/4in steel plate. Ok, that might have been overkill, but we ARE talking about brakes. There are times when they are kinda important!

Here, the motor plate's finished, the combination (rear of motor/tranny)  mounts are rounded off, and welded up,and the crossmember has been dropped, welded, and strengthened. I put a smaller washer on the left side of the motor plate, so you could see the urethane bushing.

With the dummy motor bolted in, you can see the steer-rod going from left to right, and the tie-rod going top to bottom. Now, the tricky part..........getting the exhaust from the 4 cylinders on this side, through that little opening just to the right of the tie-rod. When you find out that nobody makes headers that fit.............you make your own. When I finally finished the headers, I had 1/4 in of clearence in all directions. Now that's a tight fit!

This is everything, finally bolted up, and was getting ready to fire the motor  for the first time. I was still in the process of building my headers, but I had these block-huggers that would work for now. So now let's go through our "Redneck Mechanic's" checklist............Sparkplug wires running all over the place,(check) fuel pressure regulator hanging in the air,(check)guages leaning against the windshield(check)battery cables held firmly in place by welder's clamps(check) All that's need now is to drop in the distributor, put on a fanbelt, and duct-tape the radiator in.

I didn't use duct-tape for the radiator, I "wired" it in. At least things look a little better in this picture. You can't see the battery,guages, gallon gas can, coil, resistor, and ignition wiring hanging on the other side. Even though it looked like a patient on life-support, it fired right up, and ran like a top! The headers in this picture, and the ones I made. Notice, instead of turning in toward the block, these had to come straight down.