Subaru Conversion, CSOB style... Options

[jsteele22]

I've been thinking about what it would take to do a Subaru install
into my 914, and making it as inexpensive (and as home-brew) as
possible. I have a friend who is a machinist with a lot of enthusiasm
for the project, and a nice shop. He's done a couple of adapter plates
before, so I'm confident in that part. What I'm more curious about is
the flywheel. My idea for this is to take the stock Subaru flywheel
and machine it down to a radius of 4-5-ish inches, and then bolt a
stock Porsche (okay, VW) flywheel to it. So the Subaru FW becomes
just an adapter hub. Then, the thickness of the adapter plate is
chosen to get the input shaft to reach the proper position in the
friction plate/pilot bearing.

What do all you hybrid gurus out there think of this ? Am I
overlooking anything glaringly obvious ? (I haven't seen the pieces
in person, just in Haynes & on EBay.) Sure, the assembly will have to
be balanced carefully, but I think we (he) can handle that. The
engine I'm looking at is an EJ25 (165-ish HP) or, more realistically,
an EJ22 (130-ish), so it won't be an axle-snapper like some of you SBC
folks are driving.


Another issue is the engine mount. I've seen pics of Scott's, and
another one (tube steel) that I think Friid had made up, but not the
ultra-secret Renegade design. One idea I had on this is to not use
the stock Suby engine mount points, but instead make the adapter plate
several inches wider than the bell housing. Then each side of the
adapter plate could have an "L" shaped bracket bolted (sideways) onto
it; the bottom of the L would bolt vertically onto the plate at two
points, and the back of the L would point (horizontally) forward to
hang from a cross bar, either in the conventional (lower) position, or
up high across the top of the engine bay. This would take essentially
all of the torque off of the mounting bar bolts, and would leave an
open path for the shift linkage. In practice, I'm sure there would
need to be a little cross-bracing to prevent side-to-side motion, and
also to keep the L from straightening. Again, oh learned ones, what are
your opinions on this setup ? I *think* that suspending an engine
from the adapter plate is essentially what all the Subaru airplane
folks do.


I'm really pretty excited about the idea of putting a Suby in my car.
And it would be even more cool if it turns out to be affordable.

Please let me know what you think....

[lapuwali]

But to get the transverse setup to work, you had to seriously cut up the rear trunk, and no doubt moved the CG back significantly, as the engine is located well aft of the stock location.

I've heard the Soob transaxles are somewhat weak even in the stock application. The 2wd versions aren't all that common these days, considering they've been all 4wd for quite a while now. I suppose you could remove the center diff and block off the tailshaft, but now you're talking trading off the flywheel/adapter plate (which can be bought off the shelf from KEP for most engines you care to name) v. having to engineer your own transaxle mounts, your own shift linkage, fabricating axles, and futzing with convering the 4wd transaxle to 2wd, etc.

I also don't think of the 914 transaxle as "crappy". The tailshift linkage design wasn't the best idea, but with a side-shift linkage, the setup works a lot better than the only two Ford gearboxes I've driven ('90 Exploder and late 80s Sierra, which stands as the WORST gearbox I've ever had to use, by a large margin). The transaxle itself is plenty robust for the application it was intended for: less than 200ft/lbs of torque pushing less than 2500lbs of car.