[Luke Plaizier]

Will do, thanks for the help.

I've turned my attention today to capturing more measurements of the IB5+ vs the MTX. I'm feeling confident I can fabricate an upper gearbox mount now that I've captured all the dimensions - height from top of the bellhousing, depth from the face of the bell housing, and sideways distance from bellhousing top left mount location. I did a bunch of measurements of the clutch centre to axle/diff centre offset. I put something through the diff itself and measured the distance between the the spline mating faces. I took the compressed measurements of all the axles I have. That allows me to get full tip-to-tip measurements so I can compare against the track-width stuff I did earlier.

One bit that drew my attention was the lower torque-rod mount at the firewall side of the gearbox under the driveshafts. Those things are quite different between fiesta and focus and not transferrable. LR Focus has an intermediate bushing with 2 bushes 90 degress to one another. The LS/LT Focus embeds the bush in the mount bracket. Looking at how it had been done previously in some UK conversions I've seen - it looks like they've used a Focus LR mount bushing, reversed it, and made up a pair of odd looking brackets bolting to the transmissions to hold it. It just looked a little messy. That might still be out only option.

But I decided to take a look at how other MTX75 or MMT6 gearboxes were mounted, and it seems like an option worth testing would be to use the torque-rod gearbox mount from a MkIII Mondeo or a Jaguar Type X 4 Cyl manual with the MTX75 - although I don't think either of them came to Australia. The V6 Mondeo was also an MTX, so perhaps if that's the same for the Jaguar I might be in luck on that front. With that mount on the gearbox side, I think I could come close to being able to get an OEM Fiesta torque-rod bush and modify it slightly to work in that application. It's worth a closer look anyway. The MkIV Mondeo changed the mount again to be more like the LS/LT Focus, so that's not an option. I'm curious as to whether there are other MTX applications in Oz - like maybe the 2.3 Litre 2WD Escape.

But now the challenge of getting that mount bracket! I tried the italian place, but it looks like they charge shipping by weight, and the shipping for an engine mount bracket is something like 4 times the cost of the bracket itself. Baulk.

My best bet may be NZ, where the MkIII Mondeo was sold and shipping may not be so bad. Either that or get lucky and find one of the rare X Type manuals being wrecked. So I'll put out some queries and see how I go.


Lukeyson