Like the title says, I replaced my engine cradle this weekend.

5 or 6 months ago I was looking under the car for some reason. I noticed that the the cradle was rusting out and had partially broken away around one of the control arm mounting bolts. I thought up different ways to fix the problem and finally settled on replacing the entire cradle. Finding one was fairly easy. It took me months to get the cradle prepped and painted due to a lack of motivation. The car was still drivable so why fix it, right? Well, I decided a few weeks ago that I would use my 4 day weekend and replace the cradle at the shop where I work.

I'm not going to go into too many details unless people want them, but it was fairly straightforward. The hardest part was removing the aluminum cradle bushings from the old cradle. I have a few pictures but they aren't on this computer yet so I'll post them later. The entire job wasn't hard at all. If you can drop your engine out then you can replace the cradle. Swapping all the suspension components and the exhaust over to the new cradle takes some time. It's also a perfect opportunity to replace ball joints and control arm bushings.

Let me know if you want more details on the job. I've spent over 27 hours at the shop in the past 3 days in order to get the car done in time so I'm pretty tired and can't think properly. My mind just went totally blank so I'm off to bed.

------------------
Current vehicles:
1986 Fiero GT
1966 Ford Mustang Coupe
1973 Honda CB500K2

I have a bad rusted spot and will have to do this to my car also. Just wanted to know if you noticed and differance in the handling after the swap. Mine isn't rusted completely, just about 20% of the front drivers side. I don't have any known handling problems cause the car was that was when I got it and it is my first Fiero. I like you have been dragging my feet, lol.

I didn't notice any major differences in the handling but I don't push the car very hard when it has snow tires on it. I think that the car is a little quieter when going over bumps. The new cradle drastically changed the rear alignment. We can't do alignments at our shop so I took it one close by. They got the rear straightened out but the front needs control arm bushings.

I think new control arm bushings in the rear would make more of a difference than having a more solid cradle. I changed mine to make the car safer, not to make it handle better.

------------------
Current vehicles:
1986 Fiero GT
1966 Ford Mustang Coupe
1973 Honda CB500K2