Does anyone have any experience with narrowing a early seventies Eldorado/Toronado Transaxle. It will be used in a rear wheel drive configuration and will be aligned straight with no steering box. Any help, ideas or drawings would be appreciated. Need to get to 63" or less over all length. Thx
I assume that you are talking about narrowing the half shafts, and yes, it's been done lots of times for mid-engine swaps. The old Mid-Engineering chassis that was designed to replace the VW floor pan in kit cars used Corvette trailing arms and custom half shafts to get the correct width. Of course, the exact suspension design you select will determine how you do this. If you're planning on using the FWD suspension and torsion bars with a locked steering linkage, you'll need to ensure that the CV joints have sufficient axial movement to avoid binding at full suspension travel. If you narrow the crossmember and keep the control arms at stock length, you also need to be sure that the center link is narrowed by the same amount to avoid bump steer. If you narrow the control arms, then you need to shorten the tie rods to match. If, on the other hand, you are using a custom suspension design, like Mid-Engineering, then there are different concerns depending on the details of the design.
He said no steering. Don't ask me why, but I remember that it needed 59 ford station wagon ujoints to match the cv to a corvair rear suspension. Just something that has stuck in my mind.
I did it to a Kelmark type GT-40 type body using a 500CID Caddy a couple of times we used the stock suspension and took the torsion bar off and use a coil spring aft on the lower control arm the only hard part was finding wheels that looked good as stocker's worked the best but with today's FWD cars and current offsets that should not be a problem
Yeah, I got that. When you use a FWD suspension in a RWD adaptation, you need to lock the spindles somehow. The easy way to do that is to keep the stock center link and tie rods and simply fix the center link to the crossmember. This allows the suspension to articulate while not introducing bump steer problems. Go look under the back of a Fiero or Fiat X1/9.
By the way, I will be using a 500 inch Caddy and the transaxle so hooking to another motor will not be nessesary. This will be going under a van. I wish I had some drawings because I might consider building a 2x3 subframe to cradle this onto the stock chassis. Any copies of Chassis Manuals??? Thanks and keep up the help. DM
The CSM probably won't help. What Mid-Engineering did was to build a 2x3 frame that ran low at the front then kicked up and over the exhaust manifolds, with a crossmember over the chain cover on the trans. The motor mount scheme (at least on the Toronado) uses a single front mount on the block and a pair of mounts at the back of the trans chain cover. Mid-Engineering hung these rear mounts from the rearmost crossmember on the frame. Also, since they were using the Corvette trailing arms, the front of these arms mounted to the frame at about the front of the block, where the frame started to kick up. There used to be drawings on the web, but the links don't work anymore. You might want to search for Kelmark kit cars, as many of them were built with the Mid-Engineering chassis.
Bill Porterfield (of Mid-Engineering fame) also built a mid-engine 1978 442. Photos of that car are here and you can see some of the details of the drivetrain mounting. This is not exactly the same as used on the Kelmark chassis, but it's similar. http://www.hotrodharrys.com/cars/showarticle.php?articleID=4
I put an olds in my bmw coupe, uses the stock bmw trailing arm rear suspension and beam with shorter bmw driveshafts, turned up some adapters for the shafts to fit the olds flanges theres some more pics in my album, might give you some more ideas
This little truck runs what appears to be a Cad 500 in the bed. I don't know a thing about it though. It showed up at the Run to Roslyn in 2007 in Roslyn Wa.
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