Club 80-90 Forums

It's raining and i'm bored.

has anyone ever fitted a FWD setup such as a the golf or passat or the BMW diesel out od a rover 75 and retained the drive train from the doner car? i.e. fitted the gear box drive shafts and engine transversley across the back of the bus a la MGF?

Yes, yesterday I reversed into the driveway... and it felt like a FWD

Interesting idea. Think you'd be doing some serious chassis chopping to make it work though. Most FWD drivetrains sit in front of the axle line, and are quite tall. That's not really where the engine space is in a T25.

Yea just need a really bad T25 to experiment on , oh and the space.

Had a look at a few modern FWD gearbox drawings. seems that if you could replace the gear drive from the gb output shaft to the diff shaft with a dupex or triplex chain and sprockets it would reverse the drive to the wheels. allowing you to rotate of the engine/gearbox unit to the rear of the wheels i.e. into the existing engine space. You could also raise/lower the overall gearing. Luckily my existing diesel is pulling quite well.

Right , I know I'm having this conversation with myself but hey I do it all the time.

Honda FWD engines are mounted the opposite way round to say a rover engine (which uses a Honda designed Gbox) So if you could turn a rover engine around (the TD4 is a Beemer really) and fit a Honda gbox it would drive 5 forwards and 1 reverse! Job done?

Or take any engine and change the cams/starter motor/water pump to make it run backwards.

funnily enough. I have been looking at that. Watch this space. If it was twin cam and the cams were symetrical it would probably be Ok to just alter the timing. Might need to make sure tensioners were on the right side of any cam chain/belt. Electronic engines should be easy to fool/ reprogram. oil pump would/might need to be reversed? Mechanical injector pump might just need a retime. Got as fairly simple 2 litre perkins with a five speed box and seperate cam and injector drives on the drive. Trouble is its in Gills car. sod it theres more chance of me fitting a spitfire engine than any of this.

sounds like a hell of a lot of work and expense for not much gain.
be cheaper to buy a boxter and chuck it in.have more power and better final drive ratio's

see my last sentence.

I just like to theorise

Well, anything can be made to work with enough engineering...

Easiest way to do it would be to take the engine and box from a front engined, front wheel drive car with a longitudinal engine/gearbox arrangement, for example a Renault 21 or 25, fit in the way VW intended and invert the differential in the gearbox to make it drive in the right direction.

Would still be a lot of work for little real gain though.


Or use the engine/box from a vehicle with the gearbox infront of the engine, such as a Renault 4 or 5, easy but pointless.

Gearboxes are designes to rotate under load in one direction only. The helical cut of the gears exerts a load along the shafts which the bearings and case are designed to react to. If you load the shafts in reverse, the loads all act in the opposite direction, and things will break in a very short distance.

82JEW75 wrote:Well, anything can be made to work with enough engineering...

Easiest way to do it would be to take the engine and box from a front engined, front wheel drive car with a longitudinal engine/gearbox arrangement, for example a Renault 21 or 25, fit in the way VW intended and invert the differential in the gearbox to make it drive in the right direction.

Would still be a lot of work for little real gain though.

Or use the engine/box from a vehicle with the gearbox infront of the engine, such as a Renault 4 or 5, easy but pointless.

Tim Shettle (WV Nerd on brick-yard) is making adapter plates that allow the longitudinal transaxle gearbox from an A4/Passat to be flipped entirely over reversing the drive.

Very few gearboxes have the ability to have the diff flipped over due to the internal packaging. The Renualt UN1 can (as fitted to the renaults mentioned above), and a Subaru's can if fitted with a Subarugears reverse cut crown wheel and pinion and the case suitalby clearanced (expensive!). If there are any others, then i'm sure we would have heard of them as people would have tried to fit them into the back of a VW already!

Dave

FYI some honda engines spin the opposite way, don't know which

Yea they do but not sure how practical that would be.

I think changing the final gear drive to the diff shaft in a Rover box to a chain. might be doable but not by me thats for certain.

What about all the space infront of the engine bulkhead that we currently fill with speakers, potties and the like. If you moved the bulkhead forward you could get a transverse setup in and have acres of storage behind it.

I should add that I'm entierly happy with the setup i have and will probably always be.

if you modify the shell to fit the engine you may be subject to SVC inspection so mid engine whilst doable may not be permitted