Marcus' Corvair conversion, 914-C6 Options

[r3dplanet]

A few years back I got all excited about doing a Corvair engine conversion for my 1971 car. The project waffled. Numbers were crunched and chewed. Thought and diagrams and opinions were drawn out over long winter evenings.

One particularly rainy winter evening, I found an ad on Craigslist advertising a warehouse full of Corvair parts including engines. So my pal Rory and I drove a hundred miles into the boonies late one rainy night to what turned out to be an unmarked, geographically isolated, former slaughterhouse illuminated by a single 60 watt light bulb. No cell phone reception, no escape. We were met by a couple of toothless brothers who couldn't stop talking about Daddy. Seemingly they only did what Daddy wanted them to do. Daddy wanted them to sell the stash of Corvair parts. Daddy wanted them to steal my Toyota cargo van. Daddy needed to approve the transaction of cash for an engine. Daddy, it turned out, was long dead. The two brothers kept trying to separate Rory and I, and the creepier of the two brothers kept demanding my car keys so he could test drive my van, despite my insistence that it wasn't for sale. For the first time in a long time, I wish I had a tazer gun on me. The brothers eventually showed us exactly what I wanted - an RD code 1965 110HP engine. Fearing for our lives, Rory and I muscled the engine into the van while the brothers went to find more stuff for Daddy to sell to us, or you know, maybe a club or some rope or a ball gag or something.

I left the $100 on the bench and tore the hell out. Rory and I laughed all the way back to town, ever so pleased that we were neither killed, nor raped, nor eaten. Plus, we were one up on a Corvair engine.

So with a provenance like this, and seeing JRust's new car, Dr. Evil's project, and 914coops Nader's Nightmare all take shape I've finally decided to get serious about my own project: the VW-Porsche 914-C6.

The "C" stands for Corvair.

[r3dplanet]

Now that the case is clean it's time to really clean the case. And I mean Mommy-Dearest-toothbush-and-bleach-on-the-tile-floor-clean. Why? Glad you asked. First, I'm polishing the innards of the case for the sake of removing unseen debris - like rounghess, impregnated glass, microscopic bits of this and that. I could have left it there but since I'm taking the extra step of painting with Glyptal paint, the surface needs to be operating room clean.

First: brass brushes and the last moments of my crappy old Dremel before switching to the Roxxon.







And then the whole of the engine gets cleaned with a thousand coffee filters and denatured alcohol until no discoloration can be seen on the white coffee filters. Coffee filter paper is cheap, strong, absorbent, and lint-free. They're the perfect tool for the job. After the coffee filters come the Q-tips, with which I used half a box, in order to really make sure that no dirt was left in any of the many many hiding places.



While I Was I There I took some more time to find more casting flash and more things to polish. My favorite gem by far is this oil return "hole." When I first found this my heart skipped a beat thinking that it absolutely must of have been a piece of crankshaft or bearing or something exploding right out of the case wall. Actually, this is GM's idea of a machined oil passage. Just like snow flakes, no two Corvair engine oil passages are the same thanks to what looks like a quite a blast. I polished this with great care.



This also seemed like a great time to clean out the threads for the oil pan, top tan housing, front oil cover assembly, etc. After which I cleaned them out with Q-tips, Kroil, and alcohol.



Finally, this case half is clean enough for Glyptal paint. In reading over the requisite number of Glyptal paint scare stories I found they were usually forwarded with statements like, "I don't know why this paint flaked off since I gave it a quicky clean with WD-40 and didn't bother to bake it properly afterward." Since profound cleanliness is required, profound cleanliness was executed. All told, the cleaning alone took about four days of part-time work, after a week of part-time case polishing, after another week of part-time flash grinding.