I put the support bar on rear of engine, used a bottle jack to hold the rear motor mount while I undid the 4 side bolts and the big center one, but when I released the jack the support just dropped and pressed against the exhaust pipes. I jacked it back up again and left car like that for now. Am I going to have remove an exhaust pipe or is there way to do this not discussed in the manual?

 

You're trying to replace the spring and seat as well as the foam bush, I presume? I only changed the foamie.

 

I just wanted to replace the foam bushing! I assumed it would be easy to remove clean up the spring etc and put it all back. how did you get what was left of the foam out before squashing new one in?

 

There was nothing left of the original bushing on my car.

 

hmmm, maybe I'll try to pull what's left of my old bushing out and squeeze the new one in then....

 

This didn't go well - some notes about things that are not in the manual.

To remove the mounting bracket requires removing the exhausts. The steps are as follows:
Use a bottle jack on the main center bolt to compress the spring and ease tension on the four nuts
Theses nuts are under the exhaust pipes
The four bolts have quite a big wobble factor once you get the nuts off, but worse they are passed through two 'longitudinal members' which are loose and will come off and fall into the center of the mounting bracket.
Unless you remove the exhaust center section this is as far as you'll get.

What I wound up doing was laboriously getting it all back together and compressed again as my isolator cushion was relatively intact inside the bracket but gone between the large washer and the bracket (see the picture in first post).

I wound up cutting a shock tower rubber bung and tightening the main bolt through it. Not ideal but better than allowing movement for the time being.

If I take the exhaust off at some future point I'll put the isolator in but this is a much more involved job than I had thought....