Noise, vibration, and harshness, NVH for short, are the three things standing between a truck that feels planted and one that beats you up on every drive. It's easy to think of a truck as pure transportation: a way to earn a living or get where you're going. But your cabin is your sanctuary space, and automakers have spent 100-plus years and untold R&D dollars trying to keep it smooth, quiet, and compliant.
Old-school trucks didn't bother. Ride quality in the '50s, '60s, and '70s was famously described as something that would "jar the fillings right out of your teeth." Payload and durability came first; comfort was an afterthought. Today, trucks still have to haul but they also have to ride well, for the long haul. That balance lives or dies at one unglamorous part: the body mount.
The Part Nobody Thinks About Until It Fails
Between quieter drivetrains, better cabin sealing, and a general obsession with comfort, the days of a solid-mounted cab on a bare steel frame are long gone. Manufacturers isolate the cab from the frame with compressible mounts that absorb small vibrations and cushion bigger impacts before they ever reach the driver's seat. Simple concept. The execution, though, is where things go sideways.
Automakers design these mounts to survive the length of the warranty and not much longer. Cost cutting does the rest.
We're based in Pennsylvania. The harsh northeast winters consist of road salt, potholes, and freeze-thaw cycles on repeat. This results in sagging cabs and rotted-out body mounts which makes it one of the worst environments for this component, and also one of the best places to actually fix it.
Figure 1: A Mishimoto silicone body mount bushing next to a degraded OEM rubberย bodyย mount pulled from a customer vehicle.
What We Ruled Out
Before landing on our solution, we evaluated everything already on the market:
- OEM replacement mounts:ย fit right, sit at the correct height, quiet when new. But they're expensive, hard to source, and don't survive thousands of miles of abuse.
- Urethane/polyurethane mounts:ย tough and durable, but stiff. High-durometer urethane fights movement instead of absorbing it, shoving more vibration into the cab floor, the seat, and the driver. The mount "ears" then rotate and slide against metal, generating squeaks that grease only masks temporarily.
None of it hit the mark. So we went back to a material we already know intimately: silicone.
Why Silicone
Silicone looks like rubber but it's a different animal โ a polymer built from silicon, oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen. Three properties made it the right call for body bushings:
- Thermal stability:ย Holds its shape and flex in extreme heat or cold. Rubber stiffens in the cold and softens in the heat; silicone doesn't budge.
- Durability:ย Largely unbothered by moisture, UV, ozone, and chemical exposure.
- Versatility:ย Moldable into nearly any shape, and tunable from soft to firm depending on the application.
We tested multiple durometers to find the right balance of compliance and compressed height, then sculpted each mount to perform within the exact envelope of its factory mounting position. But the silicone itself was only half the job.
Figure 2: Mishimoto silicone body mount bushings, molded in multiple sizes to match OEM mounting positions.ย
Protecting the Metal Underneath
Moisture, road debris, and salt destroy unprotected steel. So the metal core needed the same level of obsession as the silicone.
After testing in our in-house salt spray chamber (which lets us simulate decades of corrosion in a matter of days), we landed on a two-layer defense:
- Electrogalvanizing:ย a sacrificial zinc layer that corrodes before the steel underneath does.
- Black e-coating:ย applied electrically so it flows into every hole, edge, and thread, not just flat surfaces.
Together, that combination outperforms plain paint or bare metal against salt, moisture, and gravel while keeping a factory-grade black finish that won't flake or fade. Translation: the mount doesn't need replacing again in two years because the inside rusted out.
Figureย 3:ย Mishimotoโsย in-house salt spray chamber.ย
The Hardware Matters Too
Every set ships with a full Dacromet-coated hardware kit. Every bolt, nut, and washer needed for install, engineered with the same tapered, stepped geometry OEMs use to align cab to frame.
Black Dacromet (also called Dacrotized or Geomet) isn't your average zinc plating. It's a water-based mix of zinc and aluminum flakes baked on in thin layers, with zero hydrogen exposure during application which means zero risk of hydrogen embrittlement, the hidden failure mode that can cause plated high-strength bolts to snap without warning under load.
The practical upside:
- Rated for 1,000+ hours in salt spray testing without red rust, versus a few hundred hours for standard zinc or hot-dip galvanizing
- Thin and consistent enough that it doesn't mess with thread tolerances or torque specs
- Won't chip or flake off during install like chrome or standard zinc can
Bottom line: hardware that won't rust-seize, won't secretly weaken from its own coating, and holds torque through years of salt, mud, and heat cycling.
Figureย 4: An example of the complete Dacromet-coated hardware kit included with each set - every bolt, nut and washer needed for install.ย
Proving It: The Validation Data
Talk is cheap. So instead of driving a few trucks around and writing down impressions, we measured it. Accelerometers on chassis and cab tracked the frequency and amplitude of impacts before and after the swap.
Test vehicles:
- 2002 Ford F-350 Extended Cab 7.3L with original body mounts
- 2007 Ford F-250 Crew Cab 6.0L with newer OE-style mounts
- 2014 Ford F-350 Crew Cab 6.7L with original body mounts
We deliberately tested against worn and newer OE mounts rather than brand-new-for-brand-new, since that's the real-world scenario most truck owners are actually in. Each vehicle ran the same route twice. Once with OEM mounts, once with Mishimoto mounts within the same week to keep road conditions consistent.
The result: In one representative impact event, peak vertical cab force dropped from about 1.44g to 1.38g with Mishimoto mounts installed a roughly 4% reduction in peak force. That energy has to go somewhere: into your spine, into the mount, into everything rattling around the cab. Cutting the peak means more of that hit gets absorbed at the mount instead of transmitted into the cab structure. Multiply that across the thousands of impacts a truck sees daily and the fatigue reduction, on you and the vehicle, adds up fast.
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Figureย 5: Accelerometer trace of a single impact event. Vertical cab force with OEM mounts (white) peaks higher than with Mishimoto mounts (orange).ย
Why Is a Cooling Company Making Body Mounts?
Fair question. The answer traces back to 2013.
We noticed a small percentage of warranty claims coming back on a particular radiator, so we pulled failed units and customer trucks into HQ to find the common thread. What we found was chassis flex correlating directly with radiator failures and degraded body/cab mount bushings sitting at the center of it. Once those bushings degrade, the frame and body aren't isolated anymore. NVH that should've been absorbed at the mount transfers straight into the chassis and into the cooling stack instead, putting torsional loads on the radiator it was never designed to handle.
At the time our fix was diagnostic only. We published a troubleshooting checklist flagging worn body mounts as a key inspection point. It worked. But we were pointing customers to someone else's stock-replacement bushing to fix a problem our own engineers understood better than anyone. That gap sat with us for over a decade.
This product closes it. It's not a pivot away from cooling it's an extension of it. Protecting the cooling stack means protecting everything upstream, and for trucks, that starts at the chassis-to-body interface.
The Takeaway
The Mishimoto Body Mount line balances comfort, durability, and longevity with a validated 4% reduction in peak shock loading and restored body-line alignment between cab and bed on every test vehicle. It's not a horsepower part. It's the part that protects your spine, your cooling system, and your truck's long-term durability, all at once.