I have finally came back to my long abandoned Vanagon project. One of the first projects this year will be to get the new engine in the van, that starts with putting the aptly named mustache bar on the Subaru donor engine. This is done with a motor mount kit from Smallcar I’ve had sitting around for way longer than I’d like to admit.

The kit consists of three pieces that bolt into the where the previous Subaru motor mounts were. Those four bolts holding the two Subaru mounts on took a lot of persuasion to come off. The dipstick also had to be removed in this process, which will not be removed in the build.

To replace the old dipstick I have one of their older designed aircraft style dipstick replacements as well. They seemed to have moved away from this design to the more traditional dipstick on their newer kits. Reading it looks like it takes a bit of practice, the elongated dipstick has a clear tube in it and a hole on the very top. To read it you put your finger over the hole and pull it out to see the current oil level. Just like sticking your thumb over a soda straw and pulling up.

If you can’t tell which bit is the mustache bar, it’s the shiny black bar mounted at the bottom of the dusty motor. I ended up having to add a couple spacers that are a little too long on the bottom rubber motor mounts. The mounts that I ended up with were not threaded all the way down like the ones offered at other vendors. I will have to cut the spacers a little bit as they ended up a bit too long and the nut doesn’t have enough grip for my liking.

Next up will be grafting the Vanagon transmission onto this motor.