Finished putting the buggy back together for the 2010 season

[PhillipM]

Hope that bit of the frame where all those sturdy tubes joint wasn't vital

[winifredevw]

I thought that center section was missing since you went to coil-overs, with the new pic though, I see why you might be concerned! Could you add a "sister" bar, gusseted in under the trans mount to replace the missing center of the torsion housing?

[PhillipM]

Yeah, there'll be a bar and gussets under there.

[winifredevw]

I figured so. Be sure to post a few pics of that shift linkage of yours too, I'm just curious.

[PhillipM]

Hmm, got some somewhere, will see if I can find 'em.

[PhillipM]

Hmm, maybe I haven't got any! It's pretty simple anyway, shifter goes straight forward and back with a pivot on the bottom and the linkage in the middle. Then there's a bar halfway down on the bottom of the linkage with two rose joints on, so when you tilt the stick the 'box end goes the other way.

[PhillipM]

Supercharger bought

[PhillipM]

Hmm, I was going to go 30mm wider on the rear tyres - might not work so well...

[PhillipM]

Hmm, slacked a bit on the updates here, sorry about that, have a wall of text/pictures:

Checked the new clutch, after chopping a hole in the middle of the adaptor with the angle grinder, everything fits okay, but we've got loads of spare room in the bellhousing - there's a good 30mm of wasted space there, maybe more with a tweak of the release bearing, which makes the clutch quite snatchy as the lever arm is at an angle, so we might have a little rethink there, we stuck 2 release bearings back to back for the minute just to test the pedal feel:



And, after a bit of a trawl around scrapyards and ebay, we accidentally might have bought this, an Eaton M112 supercharger from a Jaguar 4.2L V8....it was so cheap it seemed rude not to...





Anyway, that seemed to fit so nicely just by the inlet manifold it seemed a shame not to use it:



However, the more we looked at the space in the bellhousing, the more we wondered...so we bit the bullet, chopped the new front mount for the gearbox back out, took the angle grinder to the bellhousing, and started moving things again...

Bellhousing, meet angle grinder, angle grinder, meet bellhousing.
And bring your friend TIG welder...



Redid the engine and gearbox mounts, which required even more frame surgery:





And as a comparison to where the old engine was, this is the old engine cage:



Having had enough of chopping out old bits of the car, decided to make more shiny new bits, and everyone loves a shiny exhaust, no?



It took quite a while to get the lengths and routing all right, there's about 2 weeks of evening work in this, even though most of it was sorted by the first two nights, tweaking and altering after that/finishing it off took a while!





As the gears are fairly wide in the van transaxle (haven't fitted that shorter gearset yet, needs lots of fettling to make the syncro's work with it), the lengths are set to bolster the bottom end and midrange torque rather than outright peak power.











That should be enough shiny exhaust pictures to keep anyone satisfied
Apologies for the thumbnails (they do link through to a larger picture), the forum width limit fairy gave me a bollocking for them being 1024 instead of 800px

[PhillipM]

Okay, one BIG disadvantage over the rotary engine, and the old VW come to that matter, is the sump being so deep - reducing ground clearance - and needing a lot of oil control/baffles due to the constant jumping around. It being pretty vital to the engine reliability, Ed bit the bullet and spent some pennies on a dry sump pump rather than relying on sets of baffling, and we set about converting it, few issues along the way but we got there:





Yes, the belt is too long, we know. And yes, that is a bright pink mug of tea in the background.
This gave us a good 3+ inches more rear ground clearance, so hopefully the rear of the car won't take quite such a battering on steep/stepped drops like it did at the odd couple of quarry's we had to run through.

And a shiny chunk of ally billet converted itself into a pulley. Magic, eh?

[kyle_pc_75]

That exhaust is INSANE! That's so cool, it reminds me of Medusa.

[PhillipM]

Onwards....after fitting the supercharger on some temporary brackets, and tack welding the silencer up for it's final position, it quickly became obvious that our oversized 165 amp alternator wasn't going to fit in the stock location.
In fact, it wasn't going to fit anywhere we could get the belt drive on it, short of putting a gear on it and running it off the flywheel teeth...which resulted in a slightly poor solution of driving the alternator on a seperate belt that's also driven from the supercharger pulley, this might result in too much belt slip/wear, but it was the easiest way around it.
Well, the easiest way around it would be to fit one of the new starter/alternator all-in-one units, but the aftermarket versions of those at the minute bring a tear to the eye and a squeak to the voice when the invoice appears, so that was a no-go.
Try it and see method

Did a couple of beer-mat sketches after mounting everything of the old bodywork vs roughly where the new will need to sit:



I, err, well, everyone knows big wing = racecar, and it kinda works:




Old rear with Mazda:



Possible new rear end:



But everyone knows, if some wing is good, more is better:




One problem with moving the engine and gearbox so far forward, is it didn't leave much room around the radiator/fan setup, so we ended up chopping those brackets off and moving the radiator up and forwards, not ideal, but cooling takes priority over CoG here:

[



You can also see how much ground clearance/departure angle we've gained, as that's the old engine cage, which used to have the topmost bar horizontal.

[PhillipM]

Okay, another update before you all get bored of seeing it

Bit more of the plumbing and mountings were finished, yes, I know, the outlet on the charger and the inlet to the plenum aren't great, but it's a case of make something quickly that will work well enough for those pieces, as they can be easily upgraded later on when we have more time spare:



You can also see the fun we're having with the alternator...



It was starting to look a bit tight in there even with the old cage on, so we cracked on with making a new one (again, out of T45 tube - you never know if someone is going to give you a love tap up the rear...)
As the dry sump has lots of clearance in the middle between the fittings, we went a little more substantial with the under-engine guards this time, as we were forever beating the old ally sump plates back straight after events, it's only thin-wall tube so it weighs very little and gives a lot more stiffness behind the sump guards:



Oh yes, we mocked up the silencer there too, just about fits

And the new engine cage from the side:



It shows pretty well how much extra clearance we've gained from moving the transaxle/engine/shortening the bellhousing and tilting the transmission slightly (now there's no torsion housing tube in the way).
Unfortunate side effect is the centre of gravity is going to be higher at the rear of course, but needs must.

[BAJA-IT]

Nice use of the Jag S/C.

[PhillipM]

Only place big enough for the airbox, means a bit of reworking of the bulkhead though. For the moment it's going to draw from the main roof-fed airbox, but it'll probably get a seperate feed from the side scoops once we get chance:






Old dashboard got ripped out along with the wiring, to make room for some additional instruments and a new dash:





Still needs a rub down with some sandpaper and a brushed finish creating to keep reflections down, plus waiting on a few more electrical/gauge bits, but:Airbox top finished off:



And on with the weird shaped dry sump tank (only place we could find for it is behind the pulleys in the rear engine cage - believe me, we looked elsewhere - hence the strange shape: