Originally Posted by mach4

While I was getting ready to modify the front subframe I noticed something that just didn't seem right. The motor mounts didn't appear to be lined up. I decided to find out if it was for real or an optical illusion.

The yardstick is exactly aligned to the edge of the spring towers (red arrows). The spring towers must be symmetrical both with respect to the A arms and side to side. The motor mount centers are clearly not symmetrical left to right as I would have expected and pretty much assumed (yellow arrows).




This anomaly also showed itself when I removed the 380SL engine and mounted the 617 engine on my roll-around engine stand as the mounts were not centered on the uprights.




The subframe image also shows pretty graphically the area in the right front crossmember that needs to be clearanced for the pan.

Now it is pretty much agreed that the German engineers did stuff for a purpose, but I cannot think of any reason to have asymmetrical motor mounts...