Buggy Pics from the weekend.

[Rippthrough]

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!

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Anyway, one immediate issue was the new 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.

Anyway, 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:



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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.



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Yeah, one advantage of the rotary was the flat sump needed very little in the way of oil control, not the case with this.

Anyway, whilst we were at it, 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...