Well, there’s your problem. Your engine isn’t attached to your car.

I was going to start working on the drive-line today. I know the flex-disk is shot so I got a new one along with the center bearing for the drive-shaft. As long as the drive-shaft is out, I was going to replace the bushings for the shift linkage since it’s easier to get to when the drive-shaft is out.

As I was sitting in the driveway about to pull into the garage, I was thinking there was an awful lot of vibration from the engine. Maybe what I was feeling wasn’t all coming from the drive-line. The engine idles fairly smoothly (for a car with 214K miles) so if there was vibration in neutral, the source had to be something other than the drive-line.

Sure enough, both motor mounts were sheared and the engine was sitting about an inch to the left of center. It was easy enough to get the broken mounts out, but moving the engine back to center to lower on to the new mounts was a bear. I finally managed to get it to swing around and lower back down. Now that the engine is back in the right place, I have to see what else doesn’t line up anymore. Luckily I had some spare mounts in the garage, but that wasn’t how I had planned to spend my day.

8/29/08: Update. I decided to check the transmission mounts today. One was still attached. It’s amazing (or scary) how much more smoothly the engine idles when it’s actually attached to the car.