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Nice work going on here and good to think that such a hard-campaigned car may once again grace the rally stages.
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Jun 10, 2021 10:40:10 GMT
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The only word I can think of is fantastic,
I remember these from my youth when they were "current"
I love to follow threads like this and seeing the hard work resulting in deserved results,
(I'd love one of these but being 6' 5" tall and having successfully beaten anorexia I'd need one for each foot !! 😁😁)
Looking forward to seeing future updates on this,
Nigel
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BMW E39 525i Sport
BMW E46 320d Sport Touring (now sold on.)
BMW E30 325 Touring (now sold on.)
BMW E30 320 Cabriolet (Project car - currently for sale.)
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16grit
Part of things
Posts: 213
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Jun 10, 2021 11:07:02 GMT
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Nice work going on here and good to think that such a hard-campaigned car may once again grace the rally stages. Much appreciated George, way to go yet.... |
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16grit
Part of things
Posts: 213
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Jun 10, 2021 11:09:12 GMT
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The only word I can think of is fantastic, I remember these from my youth when they were "current" I love to follow threads like this and seeing the hard work resulting in deserved results, (I'd love one of these but being 6' 5" tall and having successfully beaten anorexia I'd need one for each foot !! 😁😁) Looking forward to seeing future updates on this, Nigel Thanks Nigel, they are a bit 'road shy' as a car species but well worth the effort, learning heaps as I go.. |
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16grit
Part of things
Posts: 213
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Jun 14, 2021 20:13:16 GMT
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So I am starting this one with a photo of how the car sat for some time while I got around to being able to do anything with it. I cleaned up the box section rear arms and slapped a bit of paint on them - just enough to be able to handle them while attempting to slot them into the series of suspension mounts that are bolted to the body, two pairs on either side of the transmission tunnel. This is very similar to the mounting system used on the 'inspiration' for the design, the HIllman Imp, but here, unlike Marks 1 - 6 in Davrian land, the two pairs of brackets are separated further from the car centre-line, with a larger translission tunnel, and the Imp suspension beam is left rotting in the scrapyard to face its fate as a Mk3 Escort or something similar......
What this cunning move means is that once a larger tunnel is grafted into the design, Renault and VW beetle gearboxes can now be slid right in.. both bigger and capable of rougher handling than the original Imp box - here you can see the size difference between the two, VW beetle on the left, Imp on the right..... combined with its tiny engine size (875 or 1000cc) the Imp gearbox had been one of the car's achille's heels, especially when used on the loose.
The Imp factory guys did in fact try the car with a variation of the VW beetle gearbox, more on that later.....
The development of the Davrian Mk7a from 1974 onwards took the cars in a completely different direction, opening them up to both main 'camps' of UK rallying in the early 70s, the Mini gang and the Ford posse. Oddballs with a permanently wonky bat were also indulged with the Renault and Alfa options possible thanks to the new 'modular' rear subframe for engine & box.
What the new subframe design did was to provide a platform for different engines that tied into the tub, suspension and rollcage - where the car had one - and bridging the shell across the widened transmission tunnel and acting doing some of the work of the Imp crossmember for gearbox support. With the Imp crossmember gone, two pairs of brackets on either side of the tunnel were then bolted in place with four bolts each for the rear trailing arms to hang from....
  
Ahh, the joy of colour - hope you enjoy my staggeringly joyous pic here, with highlights in light blue where the subframe bolts up to the rear corners of the tub and ties in to the rear legs of the roll cage with the same bolts, orange shows VW gearbox mounting points, red for Ford engine mounting plates, green for Renault 16 / Alpine and blueypurple for the sump guard rails....... What you might e able to pick out is that having previously bought a container-load of faked Norton grinding discs, this seemed the ideal opporunity to race my way few some of them, removing all the old engine mount brackets.
I can hear the ever-so-knowledgable-one-sat-at-the-back-who's-had-more-vw-gearboxed-kitcars-than-anyone-here-and-would-never-dream-of-ever-fitting-one-ever-again mumbling something even from this distance....but that is exactly where things are headed......but I'm getting ahead of myself.....
Last couple of pics here show the widened tunnel and trailing arm suspension mounting bracket locations - 32 holes in total -
The brackets themselves are a simple enough design, bent steel which is then tripled up in thickness for the radius arm bolts. When I had the chance to have a proper look at them at the brackets it became clear that they were in a worse state than anything on the front of the car...years of big slicks had put some pretty big forces through them, with lots of evidence of 'get it to the finish' weld repairs.....So they came off......
To be continued.....
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Last Edit: Jun 14, 2021 21:18:47 GMT by 16grit
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16grit
Part of things
Posts: 213
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Jun 14, 2021 20:57:45 GMT
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IMMEDIATELY!.....
What began to concern me even more about the rear suspension brackets was not really the dodgy weld repairs and repair washers everywhere, or the beaten-oval radius arm holes, or even the fact that someone had taken a particularly aggressive approach with a grinder on one, but the fact that when I laid them on the floor, even after they had been carefully removed and numbered, none of them, and I mean none of them, appeared to make anything close to matching pairs - in fact, the two on the extremes of the car had pivot points something close to an inch apart in height...........heavy lays the suspension bracket on a kit car builders head, as they say.......
You can see that even sat on 5 or 6mm of alloy these aren't anywhere near lining up....mmmm
so what was it? Was the tub out by that far? Had the running repairs and switch from high ride-height rally car to tarmac hugging terror meant that a few changes were made 'on the hoof' and never really fixed? Could I even make a new set if I had to?
Any so began a journey....what quickly became apparent that what I though would be a simple 90 degree inner angle on all the plates was not so...each of the plates had to have its very own - inner angle - that the two folds would be bent on......
At this point, after a few 'extras' had been completed, my cardboard box bin was filling faster than new mettle could be delivered it was time to drill a few holes and see if anything workable could actually be bolted up to the car....
In retrospect, I might have spent a little more time pondering at this point, but as not just weeks but months were very quickly 'elapsing' (cos thats what they do when it all looks futile) I was left dreaming of the seductive lines of tig welds and the gucci-cherry-on-the-cake of a little more yellow zinc - striclty as a personal reward for 'going over the top' and even starting on this thankless little side-trip that all the best (of my) projects like this seem to be littered with.....and cracked on when maybe, just maybe, I should have done a little more work to reassemble and double check and double check again. Lets not forget, those brackets are going to be controlling camber and toe.........
Each of the eight would be made up of three separate 3mm pieces, all individually shaped, or rather 'sculpted' with the grinder....blah-de-blah......
The bits were then glued together .....
Finally ..apply the goochyness....
And so, with all that extra Gucci I then braced myself to put the car down on its wheels and see where they actually pointed.....
Thanks for looking! |
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Last Edit: Jun 14, 2021 21:19:29 GMT by 16grit
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Darkspeed
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 4,668
Club RR Member Number: 39
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1976 Davrian Mark 7aDarkspeed
@darkspeed
Club Retro Rides Member 39
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Jun 14, 2021 21:20:56 GMT
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On G15's using the Imp cross-member this - large penny washer "repair" - is quite common place on competition cars  "Repair" being noted because on G15's it is not a repair but a geometry adjustment - the inner hole is enlarged / slotted and the the bolt nipped up and the position adjusted to the correct toe and then the washer tacked and then fully welded on. Generally only found on the outers as the inners would take up the required deflection in the bush unless it was too much. The trick now is to slot the bracket and use the MX5 camber alignment adjuster bolt if you find your geometry out of whack With that later Davrian system with the brackets I guess you just use shims behind the brackets which would be a far easier method. All that space in that "services tunnel" - luxury. Was the car originally road registered before it became a competition car? |
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16grit
Part of things
Posts: 213
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Jun 14, 2021 21:38:14 GMT
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The trick now is to slot the bracket and use the MX5 camber alignment adjuster bolt if you find your geometry out of whack With that later Davrian system with the brackets I guess you just use shims behind the brackets which would be a far easier method. All that space in that "services tunnel" - luxury. Was the car originally road registered before it became a competition car?
Yep the brackets can be shimmed using thin (or thick) ally sheet, if you extend out the holes to the edge on one side you can slip them in without dismantling the whole lot..
I do like the MX5 bolt idea....it might yet come to that......
The 'service tunnel' is massively spacious - radiator flow and return are bonded in, modified imp gearchange and surprisingly, lots of the lines are run through there rather than inside. I think it originally had a pretty extensive sump guard covering it also....
Thanks for taking the time to offer some advice, always appreciated...
Car was originally built as a road going rally car and has been registered all its life.....I know Tim Duffee drove his earlier version down to compete on the Firestone Rally in Spain, not sure if he took this car that far afield though...
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Darkspeed
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 4,668
Club RR Member Number: 39
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1976 Davrian Mark 7aDarkspeed
@darkspeed
Club Retro Rides Member 39
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Jun 14, 2021 22:05:11 GMT
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Forgot to add - Nice bit of welding going on there - something I do not get to say often enough on this board. |
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Darkspeed
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 4,668
Club RR Member Number: 39
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1976 Davrian Mark 7aDarkspeed
@darkspeed
Club Retro Rides Member 39
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Jun 14, 2021 22:27:09 GMT
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Perfectly equal and symmetrical geometry is only of use for cars racing round a figure 8. If you have 100 different bends to get around an asymmetrical set up may be quick round 10% and average round 90% - the symmetrical may just be average around all of them !  Sure I read when that Bruce and Jack were racing at Cooper inn testing with both drivers in each others cars Jack's cars was faster than Bruce's car. So they measured the geometry and were shocked as to how far out of line everything was so they set to getting both cars perfectly square and aligned because just think how much faster they would be - The result was now they both had slower cars.... I know that in cars, and on a bike for that matter I have a preference for a particular left or right bend direction - The mere mention of L-R will have people that know me p1ssing themselves as I have absolutely no idea which is what ! - anyway the moral is - sometimes there are very good reasons not to change things even though it may be utterly abhorrent to the engineer. We would rather change every angle in a room -  cowboy builders - to suit the perfectly level picture we just hung rather than have the picture squint so it looked level in the room where no 90 degree exists. Explains why every plasterer I knew was an alcoholic. Sorry for the rambling digression |
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Darkspeed
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 4,668
Club RR Member Number: 39
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1976 Davrian Mark 7aDarkspeed
@darkspeed
Club Retro Rides Member 39
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That's rather nice. Some of the figuring of the flame, quilted, birdseye Maple that go on customs would have me just staring at the thing rather than playing. Mainly due to the fact me being quiet when I hold a guitar is how most people prefer it!
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16grit
Part of things
Posts: 213
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OK so I've made up the rear trailing arm brackets - and would like to see how that looks for wheel angles etc but to make that worthwhile I need and engine and box in there.
I'm going to go through my thinking on this a bit later, but to keep the project moving and give me an object to work around, I bought this beautiful piece of german inginuiteering....  and while we are at it, lets not forget where this project is headed, here's my Japanese friend,
My job is to sit them down together in this: 
And try and get them to play nicely....Now when Mr. Hewland came up with his 'genius genious' ideas for a clubman race gearbox back in the day, he drempt up and then had cast a range of adapters to fit the VW type 1 Beetle gearbox case his designs were based around to a variety of (predominantly Ford at the beginning) engines and bellhousing bolt-pattern spacings. That's good news right? My 'placeholder' gearbox is a VW beetle gearbox, just like he used for his 'race transmissions'. I also knew from when I attempted to build a Ford xflow in my bedroom as a kid that the flywheel and clutch on a xfow is quite some distance from the block face, certainly more so than on the Suzuki engine, so using the Hewland adapter with the best width and a flat (6/7/8mm) adapter/spacer I could bridge the gap between the now Ford bolt pattern and the Suzuki and wedding the two in eternal bliss.....
  I would then be able to make my adapter to fit in the space between this and the Suzuki engine block, right? Right and Wrong. My joy was short-lived. Hewland designed his gearboxes to be be used MID-ENGINE, the opposite way up to how they were used in a Beetle!
And so, hidden under the beefed up side-plates with the sky-hooks and all the other bits of confusingness, is a Hewland Mk-series gearbox with its V-dub case turned the other way up, with the diff running on the other side too...
Now its only right to say that at this point, with this new-found up-side-downness-realisation, fingers chafed from excessive googlizing and eyes moist from the sting of dashed hopes, my initial idea of being able to adapt the box to a FORD bellhousing bolt-pattern AND THEN to the Suzuki pattern were suddenly not looking good.
But wait, the VW box only uses four mounting bolts around the bellhousing, surely those clever volk at VW would have put those four bellhousing bolt holes on the same PCD right, and being German and all that, Equidistant? Around the circle. The universal oneness. Pot on the beach. With Germans. Cos that's how they roll...now. Isn't it? No. Even a reject from the team at Bellingcat could see that the bolt spacing on the VW side is adifferent 'width' top to bottom and that I wasn't going to be able to just use a Formula Ford adapter with with the gearbox spun around the circular gearbox flange 180 degrees - so as to end up with the gearbox back in the orientation that god intended....
Well, after an eternity of googling and whatever, I stumbled across this vendor of Hewland adapters and actually bothered to read what it said properly. The clue is in the blue as they say.....
What I needed was actually really a thing and could be bought off the shelf....I needed a VW-Hewland -> Ford 'Beach Buggy' adapter, just like the one in the picture below. Me being me, I couldn't just buy one. My 'must buy second hand' fetish reared its ugly whatever. So I am going to break here to demonstrate the delays you can subject yourself to when you have a character trait that forces you to wait for obscure items like this to appear on ebay rather than just paying the price and moving on......  |
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Last Edit: Jun 20, 2021 6:41:35 GMT by 16grit
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16grit
Part of things
Posts: 213
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Jun 19, 2021 10:13:01 GMT
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I'm going to start this one by recapping on why I had chosen the Hewland adapter route. I try to work around my weaknesses. That means machining and one-off parts are generally speaking, but not always, off limits. I like to accomplish things cheaply, but not so that they are done 'on the cheap'. When I wake up in the middle of the night, I get myself onto google and try and find answers rather than because I'm having nightmares about how much I've just paid for something.
So I am working on the assumption that the adapter route will get me further down the road. But, I still needed to work a few things out.
1, What about the gearbox input shaft? Length? Spline count? Crank spigot bearing.
2, What flywheel / clutch setup was going to be needed after I had resolved 1?
Now Hewland themselves had faced exactly these problems, and come up with a series of 'input' or 'clutch' shafts. These are a little bit unusual on the VW type boxes they used because they have to traverse the large circular-shaped chasm of the final drive / CWP / ring & pinion chamber of the gearbox between the crank spigot on the engine side and the gearbox on the other.
I was used to 1" x 23 spline shafts on the more substantial Ford gearboxes, and a quick look confirmed that Hewland did make an input/clutch shaft at this diameter and spline count in a number of 'standard' lengths. The standard clutch on my (early type, MK1 Suzuki Swift Gti) clutch was nothing like that size. So at this point I'm thinking custom flywheel maybe, I checked with TTV and they make a Gti flywhee that could of course, be modified as required. Nice job but a neat pile of cash. So.....
A few weeks late-night googling goes by and I notice that another standard Hewland input shaft size is their slightly smaller 7/8" x 20 spline jobby. OK, little bit more time (OK< a lot more time) on the pooker and lo and beholdify, Suzuki Jeeps ran a 200mm 7/8" x 20 spline clutch plate.....if the flywheel bolt pattern on the Suzuki jeep flyweel as the same as the G13B I'd be golden...right?
So more questions: Was the Englander Hewland wise enough not to mess around too much with the input shaft design when he hacked the VW box - meaning could I use a Hewland input shaft on an othewise standard VW Type 1 gearbox? What would the standard length Hewland input shafts mean for my adapter plate (thickness etc) would it actually be feasible? Would the Hewland shaft work with my Suzuki crankshaft spigot bearing orifice or bearing?
So after some quick measurments things were looking dooable. Add item to ebay search list.....just like magic, one pops up, release bearing face not perfect so cheap, but have a possible solution for that, lets take off a side cover on the VW box and see if it speaks only German or English too.....
Well whodathoughtit as the older folks (or volks?) say?? Shaft slotted straight in, even though I was a little surprised to the screw system that is used to hold these shafts in place.
And when a Hewland adapter plate finally (ye Gods!!) showed up, I was left with this:
And of course, the standard Ford bellhousing bolt spacing that they used pretty much universally until recently...:
Stay tuned for the next update when I started working on connecting this to the Suzuki bolt spacing on the G13b block,
Thanks for looking!
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Last Edit: Jun 19, 2021 10:19:23 GMT by 16grit
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16grit
Part of things
Posts: 213
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Jun 19, 2021 11:36:55 GMT
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For this 'all you can eat' box-set-style extravaganza of rapid-fire posts, I'm 'Swiftly' moving on to flywheels and starters and MDF and patience exhausted (thats a bootleg unpublished Dickens title by the way....very difficult to find these days but oh-so-satisfying)..unilike what follows.....
OK, so I'm now armed with a VW type 1 Beetle gearbox sat on some standard gearbox mounts in the engine cradle / subframe thing. It looks happy there. Please note I could (in theory) fit any of the 'period' 'classic' (read stupidly overpriced and horribly underpowered, and unreliable to boot) collection of Ford boat-achors, including the asthmatic xflow to the popular (but tantrum-prone) Lotus Twin Cam and every Ford boys favourite Grenade, the BDA (or Buil Dit Again) . Not a chance. I'm going all 'Axis' on this (even if I don't really mean it about the Ford stuff......)
Still all pouty-chested with pride at having stumbled across the Suzuki jeep flywheel and clutch combo, I began to develop a niggling doubt (good name for a boat that, 'The Niggling Doubt')..OK so even if the Jeep flywheel fitted the bolt-spacing on my G13 crank, how would it really cope with the stratospheric rev excursions that it was likely to be exposed to? G13s are happy to go above 9k on a relatively standard bottom end...Suzuki jeeps...well, less so.....
Right at that moment (or just a few miliseonds before if you believe the latest science that free will is a myth) a flywheel popped up on ebay, a -hand-machined speciment designed to run the big 200mm clutch, flaunting a big crank spigot bearing - and an uprated 7/8" x 20 spline clutch, all as removed from a g13b turbo car. A little 'over' engineered than I would have preferred but it looks like it might have been balanced, always a good sign that someone has tried to do things properly. Good ring gear too.
Next I ordered some MDF, at around 5 or 6mm I think, with the aim of making up some kind of template to work from to cut the final piece of the puzzle, the adapter linking the ford bolt pattern to the Suzuki block.
I first drilled a pair of cross-hair type lines from a center-point on the sheet, drilled out that center and continued the lines onto both faces of the sheet. On one side I copied the Ford bolt pattern fro the Cosworth spec sheet above. I then measured the flywheel mounting boss on the end of the crank and bought a hole saw as close to this size as possible. Miraculously, the finished hole required only the very slightest of cleaning up before the sheet could be pushed onto the crank and lined up.
At this point, I was undecided as to whether to install the engine canted over (the Suzuki Swift Gti runs the engine at 15 or so degrees) or vertical. One reason for this preference was the fact that the G13B is generally accepted to be a bit of a 'heavy breather', spewing oil out of its breather at every opportunity. Running it canted over as designed appears, from anecdotal evidence, to lessen, if not eradicate this problem. Space was also an issue. From the pictures of the car right at the strart of the thread you can see that the fibreglass bodywork rakes down toward the back panel at quite some angle, potentially giving rise to clearance problems for the high cam covers of the g13b. Another factor to consider was whether the motor was going to be dry-sumped at some point. I would have been happier to dry sump it if I was really going to cant it over to say 35 degrees or something. Now if all of that sounds plausible thats because it is, but also motivating my 'canted over' logic (as well as a good angled twin weber inlet manifold that I forgot to mention above) was that I was obsessed with making this work with a (new) standard starter motor that I had acquired with some other parts, rather than accepting that I might need a custom (read expensive) new starter....Anyways, I got to work on my template:
    
Well, that was all fine and dandy. I was pretty please with myself, probably a little too much, with the 'drill a hole in a board with a hole saw and look how central everything is going to be' approach. It worked, but it pretty quickly revealed I had some issues. If I wanted to continue using the standard starter (with fixed mounting hole positions) the only position for the starter was going to be running parallel to, but under the sump lip, with the engine canted right over. This would necessitate a new sump pan - google here revealed that the Suzuki Carry (essentially the same block) has a really neat sump designed to be used when a G13 is canted right over. I had a look for one but the more I look the more I realised it wasnt going to fit.
At this point, backing myself further into a corner to suit a 'variable' that I had 'fixed', I decided enough was enough and that it was time to take a different approach.
Hope you'll tune in again, thanks for taking the time to have a look as always....
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Last Edit: Jun 20, 2021 20:49:34 GMT by 16grit
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Darkspeed
Club Retro Rides Member
Posts: 4,668
Club RR Member Number: 39
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1976 Davrian Mark 7aDarkspeed
@darkspeed
Club Retro Rides Member 39
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Jun 19, 2021 13:24:27 GMT
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When you get to boosting this thing and frying clutches drop me a PM if you fancy going all metal with the clutch. For the Strato's rebuild I bought a grasstrack racer for the Honda V6 it had in it....  ....this was mounted to an upside down VW transporter gearbox case with LSD, Hewland end case and some MK6/7 internals IIRC. Hewland parts being sought after these and the LSD were sold and covered the cost of the grasser  Anyway, connecting this to the Honda flywheel was a brand new AP racing twin plate - 7/8 -20 ( ? formula Atlantic) ORA clutch - not sure if you will be testing the torque rating but I have no doubt it will be on the shelf for some time to come should it be of interest. ETA - crossed over with the last post of your with the further info on clutch for boosted car - covered. I see more dust in Mr. AP's future |
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Last Edit: Jun 19, 2021 13:31:20 GMT by Darkspeed
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16grit
Part of things
Posts: 213
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Jun 19, 2021 13:44:11 GMT
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Thanks Darkspeed, contribution and interest always appreciated.
Ingenuity knows no bounds....or at least, not in that world. Not seen that done to a 3rib type 2(.5?) case before, best of both worlds there with the strength of that case and sideplates. Apart from the odd hillclimber I think there is more invention, creativity and honest-to-goodness engineering going on in Grassers and Autograss than almost anywhere else in UK motorsport at present....
The challenge for me has been the way this car cuts across so many other types and disciplines, Just moving a few degrees left or right of what you think you know and you discover just how much you don't know - for anyone who's played around with single-seaters or Hewlands before everything I'm rabbiting about is second nature, for others, myself included, much less so!
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16grit
Part of things
Posts: 213
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Jun 19, 2021 14:42:33 GMT
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So I found myself at a point where lots of the work I had done on the mdf template(s!) had not gotten me where I expected to. I'm not going to say it was a waste (see what I did there?), 'cos it gave me a shove into a great, new, positive mindset (man), one part epiphany to two parts digital conversion = well, read on and you'll see....
I'd read a little about digital scanning and thought this looked cool. Something that I could hitch my wagon too. My wagon in this case being a g13b motor. If I could have the whole thing scanned, and the gearbox, and a few other bits, that would provide a great starting point for all kidds of other nonsense that I was scheming - want an engine mount plate? Sure thing, push this green button over here and one will pop out right over there (the back of the Hermes delivery car that is..)
Now this scanning lark is not cheap, but after some careful shopping around I tracked down some people who could do what I wanted for not much more than I was spending a week on MDF at that point. Looking back I'm happy to acknowledge I had an MDF problem. One trip to the spotless 'clinic' though and some thorough scanning later and all that was history.
And so it came to pass that after a few weeks I was able to push the green button* and await the arrival of my friendly Hermes truck, carrying just what I'd always wanted....
Needing to get myself fully up to speed with the lingo all the digital cool-cats are using, expect to start seeing words like 'iteration' and 'agile' used extremely liberally from here on in. 
What you can see in the pictures I've attached is actually the product of some genuinely agile process work I've been doing - in fact multiple iterations have so far produced the versions pictured, but as we all know, pinning that 'just so' iteration down brings to mind expensive-to-clean-up jelly-on-the-wall scrums and all kinds of other nonsense.....so for the time being, I present some shiny metal.....
Thanks for calling back...
(*sequences in this text may contain fictitious exxageration designed to emotionally engage, for better or worse, the reader. Our tests have shown that this cannot directly endanger the reader's health and on this basis our happiness team have therefore consented to its use)
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Last Edit: Jun 19, 2021 15:15:00 GMT by 16grit
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16grit
Part of things
Posts: 213
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Jun 21, 2021 20:47:17 GMT
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Just a kwik update while I'm on the subject of my adapter plate. What follows is a series of photos showing the different fasteners I've used around and on the two sides of the adapter. Most of the 'dowels' and bolts are actually threaded joining pieces, threaded rod or double-ended threaded studs exclusively sourced from ebay, with the adapter plate then cut accordingly, and holes tapped to the different sizes needed where necessary. A large diameter countersink was used to seat the two top-most bolts, the ones you can see are titanium but only as this was the only material I could find in that particular combo of thread size (to fit the Suzuki block) and large enough countersink. Amazing that what looks so simple actually took me quite some time and effort to achieve.. Important thing is that it demonstrates what is possible to achieve with simple 'off the shelf' bits without any custom machining..
The studs below will be welded into a shallow countersink on the engine side
Starter motor flange detail below. This needed a threaded stud and then a locating dowel - cut from threaded tube and then screwed down to sit against the adapter and provide the location - nice fit into starter flange
 
Dowel fitting into Ford bolt mounting on the VW-Hewland adapter, there's two of these
The two below are both tapped, will be welded
Couple more pics showing the starter detail
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Last Edit: Jun 21, 2021 21:11:31 GMT by 16grit
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16grit
Part of things
Posts: 213
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Jun 22, 2021 18:05:40 GMT
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So, I've currently got the box and a spare engine block bolted up together in the cradle/subframe with both the VW->Ford and my Ford->Suzuki adapter in place.
I'd previously got hold of some engine mount 'kits'. These are a type from ebay that were originally designed to do a chassis mount engine conversion on Mk1 & Mk2 escorts. These days they are available with engine mount brackets pre-cut to suit Ford and the ubiquitous XE Vauxhall conversions. The chassis mount brackets have a nice 90 degree cutaway in the them to sit them on top of the exposed chassis rails in the Escort setup. I thought this offered a good starting point to install on my box section subframe. My kit came with some exceptionordinarily garish yellow poly type bushes.... I pushed that big green button again and a pair of neatly cut engine brackets to suit the Suzuki lump arrived, leaving me with the task of cutting some tube to join these to the large sized (55 something mil) tubular housing for the polybushes that will go on the other end.
So a few pics of my cheap and cheerful tube notching care of a £6 hole saw and the trusty black and decker...
  
Had to take things very carefully but this one came out fairly cleanly. Next job is to cut the angle on the other end to join the engine end plate in the first pic
Thanks for dropping by....
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16grit
Part of things
Posts: 213
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Jun 27, 2021 15:38:24 GMT
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Okay, now things were all set for an update brilliantly showing offcasing, in a massively modest manner, my 4" grinder chops as I deftly cut the engine mount tubes.....
Meanwhile, back in the real world, I was aboard the good ship 'Niggling Doubt' once again...
Now I knew that the subframe that bolts to the rear of the tub and carries the engine and box had been modified in around 1982 or 83 so that it could run a VW-cased 'MK something' Hewland gearbox.
Mounts shown in the photos on the Davrian subframe in the pic above, sporting a pair of new metalastik type VW spec rubber mounts, the box itself has two 45 degree lugs on the base of the bellhousing as pictured here:
So far so good. At the other (forward) end of the subframe, there was similarly what looked to be some part of some kind of VW Beetle front gearbox mount grafted onto a small removable box-section cross member, with two protruding mounting studs looking at me in an extremely inviting manner, as only a pair of semi-stripped (threaded) M10s can..
Now deep in my past there had been a period of VW-ness. but even though this had involved a rebuild on a bus motor and a few other bits and pieces, when the time came to look for a gearbox for the Davrian, a hazy memory of words like 'hockeystick', 'IRS' and 'swing axle' didn't get me that far...
And so I had to begin to learn that there's a few categories of VW 'typ 1' gearboxes, as well as all the possible Hewland variants. Now for reasons I had promised to go into but haven't yet, the box I'm putting in is a 'placeholder'. Most if not all of its connections to the rest of the world will have to made to be retained in future, even if the contents of the box are uprated at some point. ....After a bit of reading it looked like an 'AM Code' gearbox would work, in IRS form - the ones that have CV joint flanges - and preferable one with sideplates on the diff housing that unbolted (although more of that later....maaybe). The AM bit refers mainly to the diff ratio, in this case a 4.42......just about the lowest commonly available diff ratio, but not really ideal....
So the box that I found, is an AM code (low ratio diff) in 'three bolt' front mount, as pictured here:
Only trouble being that the existing two-stud fitting on the Davrian's cradle appeared to have originated from a 'two bolt' setup like this:
But of course, it may well have been setup in some way to work with a Hewland MK 8/9 end cover that looks like this:
Or possibly, the type of end cover that Hewland designed for VW-engine and geaboxed Formula Vee racers, which is something like this:
Anyways, it turns out that thos giants of VW beetle aftermarket fluff, EMPI, make such things as a 3 bolt to 2 bolt adapter, a solid-mount version (which I found first), and alco a polly version
Solid Mount:
Soft Mount:
Which is great. I can do one of those 'lets just put a few of these bit together and see how it looks' things (which I am particularly partial to) rather than actually doing anything....which , with the gearbox mounted at both ends, produced this,
And let me take a look at how things like this might work, (included this as it shows the Escort Mk1 / 2 chassis engine mounts I'm using too)
Which I thought was all completely cool and dandy until one particular detail of one particular picture caught my eye and got me thinking. Previously, I had imagined that with the gearbox tied into its mountings front and back, fabricating the engine mounts would be straighforward - essentially the block would bolt to the gearbox bellhousing and all I needed to do was connect the block to my chassis mounts on the subframe. Wrong. Because if and when I did this, the engine ended up inclined, steadily lower towards the rear of the car.
For whatever reason (and it could be a few), if I use a regular gearbox front mount, this place the gearbox a little high on the front, 'rocking' the gearbox on its middle mount and tilting the engine backwards. So, at present I'm just experimenting by making up some thin shims for the box to sit on in the central angled mounts, and by altering the bolt hole positions on the front mount to align things so that the engine I am using sits relatively horizontal in the subframe....
So a lot of words and not really a great deal made, but heaps of progress and hopefully the correct foundation for when I move on to what this post really should have been about, the engine mounts themselves...
And then these shims will sit in the angled bracket at the bellhousing end:
Thanks for dropping by!
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Last Edit: Jun 28, 2021 3:15:21 GMT by 16grit
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