About 6 months ago, I noticed some dark brown oil that was leaking towards the rear of the car. Afraid that it was differential oil, i took a peak and noticed it was coming from the driver’s side rear differential mount. These oil-filled mounts have a tendency to crack and replacing them is pretty straight forward. It seems that the driver’s side is the one that cracks most often so I only replaced my broken one. In doing the replacement however, you need to remove both mounts so you might want to replace both if one is leaking.
Here is the cracked/leaking (actually since dried up… i drove on it broken for quite a while and honestly didn’t notice a difference)
Things you’ll need:
floor jack
jack stands (2)
14mm and 19mm socket and wrench
breaker bar
torque wrench
wd-40 or some other lubricant (to help remove exhaust hangers)
The design of this part of the car is pretty poor. If it was more thought-out, replacing this mount would be just a matter of unbolting and replacing. Unfortunately there are 3 things in the way of doing this, the exhaust, the sway bar and the lower part of the trunk. What we need to do is drop the exhaust (no need to remove, just unhook from the rubber hangers to lower enough), unbolt (again not remove) the sway bar to get it out of the way, and then lower the differential enough for the mount to clear the trunk bottom.
Step 1: Lower the exhaust
(I removed the two rear wheels for better access but I’m not sure if that was necessary or not, your call). Remove the two hangers that support each (left and right) exhaust cans. Use some wd-40 or liquid wrench to make this an easier process. I put a jack at the back of the exhaust can to gently raise it enough to make this simple. Once all 4 rubber hangers are removed, the exhaust will drop down about 3-4 inches (enough to give us the space we need.
Step 2: Lower the sway bar
The sway bar is also in the way of the mount, so now that the exhaust is out of the way, it’s easy to remove the 4 (2 on each side) bolts that are holding the bushings to the sub frame. Once these 4 bolts are removed, you can swing the sway bar either up or down to be out of your way.
Step 3: Unbolt both mounts
We need to unbolt the left and right mount because we need to lower the differential enough to get the mount off. At this point make sure to support the differential with a jack because we’re going to slowly lower it to pull our mount off and then we’ll need to raise it again to get it bolted back up.
Step 4: Replace Mount, Reattach Sway Bar and Exhaust
Remove the 19mm center bolt first and then the 4-14mm bolts second. Do this for both sides.
Once unbolted, you’ll notice that you can’t just slide the mount off, it’s still hitting the trunk space. With both L/R mounts unbolted, slide them forward so they’re out of the bracket, and slowly lower the differential until there’s enough clearance to slip the mount off and replace it with the new one. the left (driver’s side) mount is P/N: 50740-S2A-023.
With the new mount on, rebolt everything in the reverse order of removal. The 14mm bolts for the mount go on at 33 ft/lbs and then the 19mm bolt at 47 ft/lbs. The 14mm bolts for the sway bar bushings go on at 40ft/lbs.
Clean up, admire your work and go have a sandwich.
