65 Corvair known as the "Spousal Avoidance Unit"

[Zuffen]

Do you plan on lubing the bush?

I'd be inclined to instal a grease nipple at keep it lubed as the alloy will gall up.

[hrm2k]

Zuffen, you are 100%correct...........

We had not gotten to that yet. I'm sure you know how it goes........."put that damn thing in place and let's see what it looks like"
We wanted to find out where to mount to the coil overs.
Now that we have that information, I am going to take the arms back off, drill and install a zerk fitting in the bushing itself. I also plan to cut a groove inside the bushing ( sort of like spiral shape)going around the sleeve so grease has a place to build up a little and will spread more as the bushing turns.

[Zuffen]

I get where you're coming from on fitting parts.

Nothing like seeing if what was in your mind's eye translated well into hard metal.

Cutting a spiral will work as would a letter H as this would move the grease toward the outside of the bush as well.

[hrm2k]

It has been almost a month since I did an update. Planning seems to take far more time than I thought or at least planned for. We have just tacked together the front cross member. Our plans call for welding in cross member brackets that came on the car. We have constructed the new cross member out of 2.250 ID thick wall square tube. It will be bolted into the bracket with a 9/16th bolt.
That might be a little industrial for some but it has become a major component. The motor mounts are fabbed and fitted but not yet tacked when this photo was taken.
The gold arms that can be seen in the picture below the cross member are on a jig placed between the trailing arm bolts. We will be fabbing up some brackets for the bottom of the cross member to hold one end of the arm. The other end of the arm will attach to the trailing arm itself. This will be a brace as well as the toe in / toe out adjuster.....at least that is the plan..........



I also ordered some headers that were built for a V8 S-10 conversion. The passenger's side header fits like a dream and requires very little



The same cannot be said for the driver's side. That one is going to require a little work




more to follow soon

[Stevie G]

Have you considered going out over the transaxle with the exhaust?
Then you could either tip them down and go through the splash...OR have the coolest exhaust tips coming out between the taillights.
Just a thought. That drivers side is a liiiiiiittle tight.

[Grant]

This is awesome! I plan on getting a 2ng gen Corvair next except i will be swapping a turbo 4 cylinder in. You have some of the best pictures i have seen of a corvair all apart. It seems like all of the other one i have seen were scanned prints.

You could also get some drag boat headers and run them just below the trunk lid lol. Have them come out in the license plate area like Steve said.

[hrm2k]

IT has been a while since the last update. The transaxle is out for the rebuild. Our rear crossmember has been completed as shown in this picture. The new coil overs can be seen in the background.
We ended up using a straight across bar. It just made more sense

The straight across bar bolts to a bracket that sits on top of the frame. There is a
1/2 " piece of pure neoprene rubber between the bar and the mount. Not shown is the extra pieces added to the side of the brackets for more strength



The mockup for the radiator mount is shown in this picture. You can also see the tacked together crossmember



As we have continued on this project, I wondered about the actual strength of the stock frame rails. We decided to plate the frame rails along with the top of the rails ( which will hold our coil overs ). We used 1/8 " plate to add some strength to these areas as shown in this picture.



We have just finished the tacking together of the new suspension arms. The entire trailing arm package moves with no binding or problems. I will try to post some of those in the next few days.

Our plan is to have the built motor and rebuilt transaxle bolted into the car by the 4th of July......

[hrm2k]

I promised a quicker update so here it is. We have been agonizing over how to handle the trailing arms and newly required adjustment rods which did not exist. While we were in the throws of heavy debate, my buddy Frank Jenkins who is the driving force making me work on this thing, saw my old strut rods from a Corvair Motorsports Kit that were on the car before I started this adventure. I thought he had found a lot of money by the way he was yelling. Turns out in his mind, the strut rods would serve the purpose of adjustment rod on the trailing arm.
We found the points that are the same level as the trailing arms. It turns out the strut rods were almost perfect in length to the trailing arms. Some basic geometry and we knew we had come up with something pretty good. We made all of our plots, fabbed up some brackets and here you are:



here is a closer look at how they are mounted. We still need to finalize the welding along with gussets on all the attach points. The bars are at the same angle as the trailing arms. We found that we had about 14 inches of non-binding travel with this setup. That is more than enough as we are planning to have a total of 5 inches of travel with the coil overs.



Last but not least, a small block chevy needs to have a notched oil pan for the cross over axle. None exist so we made our own using some tubing that we has in the shop.



and for the HAMBers, Yep !! the old oil pan out of the T


Next update : The motor build

[hrm2k]

Well, the engine got put off for another week so I went to work on some of the other pieces.
First was cleaning up the cross member and doing some final welding and dressing


This will be the final time out of the car for the cross member. You can also see the placement of the control arm brackets for the trailing arms. They have yet to be gusseted and final welded but that should change in the next couple of hours.

One of the guys on another board asked me a couple of questions regarding how the control arm attached to the trailing arms. We used a 1/2 bolt; removed the head and ground a 45 degree angle. after figuring out the correct lenght, we tacked the bolt to the trailing arm as you can see in this picture.



We will gusset this bolt from 3 sides when we do the final welding. Also visible is the tacked in place coil over mounts on top of the arm. These will also be gusseted and final welded.

While I we were getting ready to tack the coil over mounts to the arm, I snapped this picture which shows where the coil over will live when we are done



The top of the coil over is done with a stud which sticks through the are above the wheel.....not exact but you get the idea



I looked a long time to find out how others have done their axles in these kind of conversions but had little luck. So a my buddy Frank Jenkins and I decided to do our own engineering. I bought 2 axles for a 73 Eldorado. we knew they had to be shortened. After talking about the axles for a week or so, we decided to use Th350 output yokes. We found a machinist who is goig to turn down the axle shaft as well as shorten them. Then he is going to spline the axle shaft to be exactly like a turbo 350 output. We will give it about a 3 thousands oversize so the yokes are a heavy press fit. Here is what the axle and the yokes look like



Since we got rid of a few pieces of rod holding the trailing arms in place, it was only natural to take a look at how the louvered trunk lid is going to look on the car............kind of liking this look


more news to follow this next week:

[hrm2k]

Things have started to move rather fast. A couple of afternoons and we now have an engine



While adjusting the valves, we got stuck on something in the engine. The crank was hitting something. We just about crapped in our drawers. After some investigation, it turns out a piece of the windage tray which was cut for the axle tunnel was being hit by one throw on the crank. We dropped the oil pan and made quick work moving it out of the way. Nothing hits anymore...... here is what the axle tunnel ended up looking like




Looks like the entire engine transaxle will be hung in the car late next week........I'm driving it before September 1st