5.7 Gi engine alignment woes

[kd4pbs]

Good morning,
I've finally reached a point in the total rebuild of the engine and repaint of the outdrive and transom shield that I need to align the engine.
This boat (a 2003 Regal 2400LSR) was used by Florida Man in Florida salt water, and I've had to deal with lots of wacky stuff that really left me wondering "why?!" It was apparently rode hard and put up wet every outing.
Lots of stuff was useless on this thing due to the hard life it led. I decided that since the engine was a broken, cracked, rusted heap of iron oxide (seller indicated it only needed a valve job), I'd go ahead and remove the transom assembly and remove all corrosion and repaint. Upon the way, I noticed the rear engine mounts that bolt to the inner transom plate really were not in great shape. I found a decent used set. Now that everything is in, I've run the front (side) engine mounts pretty much from one end to the other to no avail. It seems that no matter where those front mounts get adjusted, the alignment tool will not go into the spline. It appears that the rear of the engine sits about 1/4"-1/8" too low, and the bar just hits the top face of the coupler spline no matter where the fronts are.
The rear mounts look identical to these:

VOLVO PENTA REAR MOUNT KIT FOR 4.3 5.0 5.7 8.1 SX-M DP-SM SX-A DPS-A 3857439 | eBay

ALL NEW VOLVO PENTA PARTS CARRY A FACTORY 1 YEAR WARRANTY! ALL USED PARTS SOLD AS IS!

www.ebay.com

This is my first Volvo-Penta drive. I've done a handful of Mercruisers in the past, both Alpha and Bravo, and I seem to remember those had heavily spring loaded rear mounts which one could slightly tweak. There doesn't seem to be such an ability on the VP. It almost seems like the only way to move the drive upwards in the rear with relation to the inner transom plate would be to shim under the "ears" where the flywheel cover mounts to these engine mounts.
And no, the issue isn't a rotted transom. Apparently someone who actually knew what they were doing replaced it at some point in the near past - and was done well and is solid as a rock.
Have any of you seen this before?

 

[kenny nunez]

Try using an engine hoist attached to the front of the engine and the front mounts with the nuts bottomed out. Then raising and lowering the engine while to get the alignment bar to engage the splines. I feel your pain as I have had a few that really tested my patience.
If you do not have an engine hoist use a small bottle jack under the harmonic balancer.

 

[kd4pbs]

The whole swing through from full down to full up on the front adjusters, the alignment bar contacts the top face of the coupler spline.
That's a great idea though - your way would have at least helped me more quickly reach the conclusion that there's no amount of bolt adjusting on the normal front (side of engine) mounts that will fix it

 

[kenny nunez]

I guess that since you have experience with Mercruisers you know how to swivel around the alinement bar inside the gimbal bearing. With the engine raised enough try completely removing the adjustable engine mounts to give more range of movement that may allow the alignment bar to engage the splines.
Another trick I have used to get it close is with just the front end of the driveshaft ( I had a used one.)In your case you will have to remove it from your drive. Also you may need a slide hammer to pull it out if it gets stuck.

 

[kd4pbs]

I've got a yoke from a Mercruiser. It will fit too. Problem is, no amount of adjustable pitch change to the angle between the transom inner plate and the flywheel housing will allow concentricity to the gimbal bearing. It is basically as if the up-down pivot point is exactly in line with the plane of the face of the spline on the coupler, so any vertical change of the front engine mounts only changes the vertical angle of the shaft engagement, but not the actual up-down "entrance" position of the shaft/alignment tool to the splines. The full range of adjustment leaves me hitting what looks to be almost the exact 1/4" too high the whole way through the front mount adjustment range.
I did not see any shims under or on the old mounts when I removed everything, and I didn't have much issue removing the drive, so it obviously was not severely misaligned before I screwed things up, so I'm really scratching my head on this one.
The only thing I have yet to verify is that I got the bearing seated all the way home all the way around, and not cocked. That's my next step before pulling the engine out of the way and shimming the rear mounts.
Thank you for the ideas, sir!

 

[kd4pbs]

I just cracked up a beer and thought about the problem. I do believe stupid me probably just reefed the nylock rear mount bolts on down until I was able to put a good amount of elbow torque on those. The problem is, if you look at the picture on the eBay of those mounts, this would compress the large flat washer on top of the rubber pretty significantly. My guess is all I have to do is loosen the nuts until the alignment tool engages in the center of the entrance of the spine. Then I can fix my other screw up where I’ve wrenched the front mounts way out of position. I will report back what I find so I don’t leave some guy hanging eight years from now with the exact same issue maybe I should RT FM once in a while!

 

[kenny nunez]

Set me straight here, did you place the large flat washer over the studs then placed the engine on top of them? I hope not but if you did that then that is the problem.

 

[kd4pbs]

No. That would have put the spline way too high.
I did figure it out. It was my own ignorance. Of course!
I have aligned drives countless times and now that I think about it, never had to massively realign one, but I’ve never had to align one after replacing a gimbal bearing or in this case, removing the good one and then reinstalling it since I had to sandblast things. I never realized that the outer race on these bearings are actually spherical and can pivot around several degrees in every direction. So basically when it went back in, it was misaligned and pointed upwards. It wasn’t until I pushed upwards on the tail of the alignment tool that I realize these bearing swivel all over the place. Sure is a lot easier when things are pointed in the right direction!
Thanks for the ideas…. This one had me in a kerfuffle for about a day scratching my head. So yeah, you pegged what the issue was but I never knew the bearing swivels and did not understand. Thanks!