The wacky engine conversion thread

Not exactly that wacky over here. Most all the surviving Anglias have been hotrodded with engine swaps over here in the US.
 
Can't believe nobody has mentioned the Ferrari F355 V8 in a Nissan Sunny.

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This should qualify I think. Renault Espace body with essentially an entire F1 car underneath.

espaceg.jpg


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what what? The rear seats are litterally next to the engine? How seriously deaf do you wanna be! Also, what a dilemma, do I drive it or sit in the back of it? :lol:
 
V12 mazda miata. WTF. :blink::mrgreen:

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZLnrOeu0KE[/YOUTUBE]
 
I've seen plenty in excellent condition. I've never heard of the fire problems.

If the car was such a failure than why did Ford work damn fast to come up with a response to the market demand for the Covair... with the Mustang?

GM built them for 9 years, in the early 60's they were one of the best selling vehicles on the road. Too top it off they looked good and handled well, until you went through a series of switch backs, a problem that was cured by 64, before Nader's book even came out.
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It is official. I have now seen every possible argument known to man on the internet. The day someone would defend the Covair is the day the earth should end...:)
 
Yeah I remember reading the build thread on that V12 miata, Jag V12. glad to see he got it running. Though the firewall is cut to hell. There is also a 2JZ miata floating around somewhere.
 
It is official. I have now seen every possible argument known to man on the internet. The day someone would defend the Covair is the day the earth should end...:)

Don't go to a corvair owners meet then... :lol: BTW, that post was 100% truth.

Yeah I remember reading the build thread on that V12 miata, Jag V12. glad to see he got it running. Though the firewall is cut to hell. There is also a 2JZ miata floating around somewhere.

There is a 2jz s2000. Personally I think that swap is utterly pointless. Atleast with the v8 swaps you can make an ATTEMPT to keep the handling of the car while gaining power. The V12 is excused on account that it's got 6 webber down drafts and sounds better than any boosted 6 pot.
 
i've seen a few... mostly LSx swaps have caught my attention.

here's a twin turbo LS1 into an older volvo station wagon...

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f86bsY1Iv9I[/YOUTUBE]

LS1 into a 350Z

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hch_kRlzJdo[/YOUTUBE]

LS1 into a porsche 944 (hopefully something i'll do sometime soon)

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dsPe40C__A[/YOUTUBE]

turbo LS7 in a pontiac solstice

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H4b8TEWlqQ[/YOUTUBE]

LS7 swap into a GTO. this was actually a project us florida GTO owners took part of... the owner was a close friend of many of us and was unfortunately killed in a helo accident (he was in the army). so a lot of us pitched in and made his dream of an LS7 swapped into his GTO a reality. this was the video shot at our drag day.

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4-_NxKBcIk[/YOUTUBE]
 
whats so whacky? all corvairs are mid-engined, its mostly why the car was a failure due to the engine and gas tank being next to each other. they were deemed "unsafe at any speed".

Nobody seems to remember the countless fires that plauged the corvair from being rear ended? c'mon you guys cannot think the corvair was anything but a failure. it certainly wasn't a success. I cant even remember the last time I saw one that wasn't a pile of parts in a field
Wow, could you be more ignorant about a car? You need some serious mythbusting.

  • Corvairs were rear-engined.
  • The gas tank was in the front, behind the crossmember, 9 feet from the engine.
  • The only person who deemed them Unsafe At Any Speed was Ralph Nader, and there were many other cars covered in his book of the same name. The really funny thing is, the very department created to oversee automotive safety at Nader's insistence, the NHTSA, cleared the Corvair of Nader's charges and proved him wrong: "The Corvair handling and stability compared favorably with the other contemporary vehicles used in the NHTSA testing programs. Vehicle rollover did not occur in any of the comparative tests for the Corvair, Falcon or Valiant. The Volkswagen and the Renault did rollover in some of the comparative tests."
  • I've never heard of a Corvair catching fire from being rear-ended. But then, I've only been buying, driving, restoring and racing them for 23 years. You're thinking of the Ford Pinto.
  • The Corvair was offered as a four-door sedan, two-door coupe, convertible, cargo van, passenger van, pickup truck and station wagon during its 10 years and 1.8 million cars. Other companies have made everything from sporty kit cars to dune buggies to motor homes (called the UltraVan) to homebuilt airplanes with Corvair drivetrains. Porsche couldn't figure out how to cool a flat-6, so they bought a new Corvair when they became available, and continued to do so every year it was in production. If it hadn't been for the Corvair, the 911 wouldn't have gone into production until Porsche's engineers had figured it out on their own (I used to work for Porsche). And, as thedguy correctly noted, it was the inspiration for the Mustang. It was hardly a failure.
  • I'm gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that the real reason you haven't seen one that wasn't a pile of parts in a field, is because you live in NEW HAMPSHIRE. Maybe you should try the internet. Say, http://www.corvaircorsa.com ?

Ehh the engine in the back of the corvair near the gas tank had nothing to do with it being unsafe. The corvair was unsafe if you didn't keep the tire pressures adjusted to their odd ball specifications. Early models were unsafe because the steering column would impale you in an accident but that was true of most cars from that era. Early models were also unsafe because exhaust gases could intrude into the cabin from the heating system.
The Corvair could've been ahead of its time, or just ahead of its parts suppliers. Now that technology has advanced, the companies supplying Corvair parts (like Clark's, Cotrofeld, Wall's Underground, Dale Manufacturing, etc.) have made improvements in the materials. So now you can have a Corvair that doesn't flip or toss fan belts, drip oil from the pushrod tube o-rings, or even leak fumes from the heater (something that I don't think was ever addressed on VW's). That last issue was corrected by making the exhaust manifold gaskets from the same material as recently used by small aircraft, such as the Lycoming and Continental engines used in any brand of light aircraft. Yes, Cessnas, Pipers and even Beechcraft have had the same problems with their heaters.

The Corvair gained its unsafe notoriety from it's poorly designed rear suspension.
That would be the swing-axle suspension, which was also used on VW Beetles, Porsche 356s (and derivatives), Mercedes 300SL, Renaults, Fiats, etc., etc. Chevrolet replaced the swing-axle design with a true double-jointed IRS for the 1965 models (1964 got a transverse leaf spring), while the German-engineered VW didn't catch up until 1969.

I've seen plenty in excellent condition. I've never heard of the fire problems.

If the car was such a failure than why did Ford work damn fast to come up with a response to the market demand for the Covair... with the Mustang?

GM built them for 9 years, in the early 60's they were one of the best selling vehicles on the road. Too top it off they looked good and handled well, until you went through a series of switch backs, a problem that was cured by 64, before Nader's book even came out.
Now you're a proper petrolhead. To be exact, it was the 1960 "SuperMonza" coupe, a show car built for autoshow circuit and later used by Bill Mitchell's daughter as her daily driver. Lee Iacocca saw the car at the Detroit Auto Show in 1960 and realized Ford better come up with some competition. He even copied the "side strakes" in the quarter panel!
corvair_supermonza_02.jpg


It is official. I have now seen every possible argument known to man on the internet. The day someone would defend the Covair is the day the earth should end...:)
Nah, the Earth is safe. But if, God forbid, anyone should ever defend the Saab Sonnet... :lol:

Now, back to engine swaps. I've seen so many, from LS-1-powered RX-7's and Miatas to Viper V10-powered Jaguar XJS's to front-engined, Jaguar V12-powered Corvairs:
jejagv12.JPG


But one of my favorites was a Honda CRX one of my high school friends built. He took the turbocharged 2.2 Mitsubishi from a Shelby Charger and mounted it mid-ship in the CRX! Brilliant! It won a lot of drag races at the import shows too. In fact, he got disqualified from an event for having an "American" engine, and beat it by proving it was a Japanese Mitsu engine. Ah, good times... good times...
 
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That would be the swing-axle suspension, which was also used on VW Beetles, Porsche 356s (and derivatives), Mercedes 300SL, Renaults, Fiats, etc., etc. Chevrolet replaced the swing-axle design with a true double-jointed IRS for the 1965 models (1964 got a transverse leaf spring), while the German-engineered VW didn't catch up until 1969.

Well, anything with swing axles is a bloody disaster waiting to happen - I think you'd have to agree with that.
 
^ It's not the best suspension design, true, but to single out the Corvair for a design that was quite common at the time...
 
Common, yes. Stupid, also yes.

Some people weren't quite so dumb. It's amazing what some people can design on the back of an envelope that giant German and American corporations with millions of dollars *can't*... :D

usedjagur.jpg

{Not a swing axle. If you don't know what this is, you need to be kicked out of the petrolhead/gearhead club.}

I would rather drive a stick axle vehicle than tempt fate with swing axles. Hell, swing axles killed a *lot* of the world's top racing talent in the 50s and 60s.
 
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I'm not sure if this is really a swap, it's more of a body built on an v-10 f1 engine but still...

Behold the 164 with a V-10 F1 engine (yes I know this was posted somewhere in some thread a while back, but I deserves to be in this thread)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQigN057dMw
(embedding was disabled on this one)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p36U-ReVQO4&feature=PlayList&p=68CCD91DA4C97BF0&index=46[/youtube]
 
I saw this wasn't mentioned (probably because everyone knows about it)
[YOUTUBE]oPQIizRp9ck[/YOUTUBE]
[youtube]f5S1NAMnYKM[/youtube]
Smart car with a Hayabusa engine.
 
The Beast

[youtube]http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=HwRwN7ewAzs[/youtube]
 
Common, yes. Stupid, also yes.

Some people weren't quite so dumb. It's amazing what some people can design on the back of an envelope that giant German and American corporations with millions of dollars *can't*... :D

usedjagur.jpg

{Not a swing axle. If you don't know what this is, you need to be kicked out of the petrolhead/gearhead club.}

I would rather drive a stick axle vehicle than tempt fate with swing axles. Hell, swing axles killed a *lot* of the world's top racing talent in the 50s and 60s.
That's why German and American corporations have millions of dollars (well, not the Americans anymore) and Jaguar has never made much money: They used sheap-to-build swing axles instead of spending the money to build a proper IRS like the one in your picture.

GM did, eventually, get the hint.
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Back to the engine swaps, I remember a second-gen Corvair being given the full drivetrain from a 964-series Porsche 911 Carrera 4 in one of my magazines. Can't find anything about it on the web though, so sorry, but no pics.
 
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