Yeah, problem was it was on a side slope on wet grass and she kept trying to go backwards down the hill with the power on (open diff), so it was a bit of a suck-it-and-see moment there, probably doing about 60-70mph I think.
very nice, l always had a hankering for a fugative but never managed to get my hands on one,
what engine are you running ? and a beetle box ? or are you using an audi or some think similar, looks like you arnt frightened to give it some stick lol
It's a rotary, 260 odd horsies, no, not a beetle box, we blew enough of those up with the aircooled motor, so wasn't even trying it with the mazda engine, it's on a renault transaxle.
neat
the rotary engine explains how you have 260hp from 1.3 lt,
or 2.6 lt depending on your conversion formula, 260 hp from 2.6 lt would be bang on the money at the magic figure of 100 bhp per litre,
which generation engine is it 1st 2nd or 3rd ?
does the engine give you much trouble ? l have a 3rd gen twin turbo and it was nothing but trouble for road use, l always thought each trip would be its last, it was a ****** for flooding which usually then meant a tow start, going further than the corner shop was a big trip as l dident want to wear it out prematurly, l rebiult the engine once, to many fiddley tips for my big fingers
the rex now sits engineless in the barn waiting for LS1 engines to become cheap enough for my pocket
how did you join the rotary to the gearbox is there an adapter plate available or did you make one, did you make your own trailing arms ?
It's the renesis, all the variable intake gubbins, comes in the 2.0 litre class for racing. No boost though. Well, not yet
We have had some trouble with apex seal wear, but never with any flooding or anything - fuel injection sorts that out!
Don't have any trouble with short trips either any more.
First engine we killed a sideseal from overheating it before we sorted the cooling out properly and that was showing some apex seal wear, second engine went with the same apex seal wear but after having a good look over the winter that might well be due to the filteration not being quite up to the job - so we're fitting pre-filters to the air intake this year - some silicon traces in the oil and chambers presumably from sand/dust.
We made the adaptor plate for the gearbox, and the trailing arms front and rear, and frame, and the dampers aren't standard, and we made the flywheel, and this, and that, and...
Never ending journey!
It's a pretty strange setup as rear traction is king offroad - so there's plenty of weight over the back and even more when you get on the power, and the buggy's fitted with brakes that can lock either side of the car up to steer on, so get it on tarmac and you basically go in too fast for the front end to deal with in a flurry of understeer, then pull the steering brake which pivots the car into the apex, then get on the power with the steering brake still on( as it lifts the front with the power on and you have ****** all steering), which results in some very strange sideways fun.
The only real trouble is the 3rd and 4th gear are far too long, and it has a massive gap from 2nd to 3rd, so it can take some time to slug up from the bottom of 3rd gear on tarmac (that's being sorted next week, thankfully, finally pulled enough money together to have some gears ground)
Landing of pic 3 was smooth as a whistle, it was going fast enough to just land flat on the other side without a hiccup.
You can see it on the first lap - that's the first event we finished with the car after building it up - got a lot faster as the day went on and we got used to it, but sadly no video from later.
It's a fair bit quicker these days mind!
Comp Safari is probably one of the cheaper sports to get going in tbh - obviously you still get the big boys spending the same on a gearbox as you spent building your entire car, trailer and tow vehicle - but the classes are so varied and the regs are open enough that some innovation and hard work can get you fairly high up, there's everything from 6 figure cars in dedicated race trucks turning up, to the local lad with a buggy on an old trailer who's competing on £3-400 for the weekend.
I've got shedloads more pictures and bits of it, as it's an ongoing project, lots of upgrades (and crash repairs )
Didn't give much info on this the first time around, so since it's undergoing a winter revamp, I thought I'd flesh the thread out a little with the upgrades!
Right, we had this up for sale for a while, had a guy come to have a look, decided he wanted it if we could stick a cheap 2-litre 4-pot in it for him, so we sold off some of the rotary bits, did a bit of research, bought some parts and started chopping the frame...
...A month after that, he came by to say he was very sorry, but he couldn't afford to do it after all, and could he have his deposit back....
Anyway, since we'd done the research, started chopping, and bought some bits, and we had a bit of spare time over winter....it seemed rude not to give the old girl another chance
She's had a bit of plastic surgery courtesy of Mister 9 Inch (angle grinder, get your mind out of the gutter):
As the new engine is longer than the rotary, we chopped out the centre of the beam tube so that we can push the transaxle forwards into the cabin a couple of inches to keep the rear overhang similar, we don't need that reinforced part there any more anyway because it was what the old torsion bars used to run through/work against, so it was basically a great hunk of steel tube and plate doing nothing.
Free weight saving!
Anyway, one immediate issue was the engine used a pull clutch, and there's no room in the transaxle to make that work, so we needed to convert to a push clutch somehow. We found a plate that was a similar size and a diaphragm that would fit, but the spline for the Renault transaxle was wrong, so we nipped up to CG Motorsports to see if they could stick us a Renault spline in the clutch we'd found (or a paddle version of it).
We used to just weld centres in off-the-shelf paddles for the VW clutch setup, but the splines never last that long as they soften a little from the welding heat no matter what you do to keep them cool, so we wanted to do it 'properly' this time.
Mick had a good look, and decided he'd got an even bigger paddle and push diagphram already sat on a shelf that would go on the standard flywheel - provided we gave it a skim to take the raised surface off it - so we came back with a nice 230mm setup:
Which looks a little more promising than our old lash-up of Renault/VW/RX-8:
Due to a bit more weight/leverage and stress being anticipated this time, we went with poly mounts for the transaxle instead of the old solid strap system, there's no real movement in them for the engine torque, etc, they're simply to reduce shock loads on the gearbox from landings/frame flex.
And as you can see, moving the transaxle forward proved to be quite a tight fit....
Then we mocked up an adaptor plate for the bellhousing to the new engine, and bolted it up just to see how it fitted:
Which as it turns out, is almost exactly where the rotary was after the alterations.
That big chunk of steel holding all these tubes together in the middle wasn't important, was it? I'm sure it wasn't. It'll be fine. Maybe.
Whilst we had everything else out of the way, we thought about maybe going a touch wider on the rear tyres to compensate for the additional rear weight bias, might need a rethink on that one, not a whole lot of room left
And we 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 wasted 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
Charger was £150, it's almost perfect condition, came off a nice low milage car
And as for plumbing the charger in...read on
First, we needed to address the sump, one BIG disadvantage over the rotary engine, 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, I 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 Kirton.
And a shiny chunk of ally billet converted itself into a pulley. Magic, eh?
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:
And 2 minutes of sketching later....
But everyone knows, if some is good, more is better....
Alright, enough of me being silly...
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.
And 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 the best piece of design work, 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.