OK I had another situation where I saw something on the internet that caused my mind to run around saying “This is perfect! This will fix all my problems!” and happily run rampant as I try to sleep. What started this was Cleetus finding a Renli 4X4 with nothing except the front and rear diffs left of the drivetrain. A little research tells me those differentials have 1:1 gears and are purpose made to turn a transverse FWD engine and transmission mounted longitudinally into an all-wheel drive drivetrain. And guess what I have with the Town and Country donor vehicle?
I could regale you for pages upon pages of discarded concepts and wild-assed ideas that I came up with while trying to get to sleep last night, and I still haven’t decided yet what I want to do. If I go with the AWD that destroys the sunk costs of the parts I already bought and/or built for the RWD version I have been working to build all these years. Basically the only thing I could use would be the fiberglass body, the windshield posts, and the steering wheel. All the suspension parts would be essentially trash as they couldn’t be sold for as much as half what they cost, especially the custom front axle and the steering parts. That loss would come to about $500 plus my time and labor preparing those parts for installation. In the grand scheme of things that’s not a lot of money, but it represents a ton of hustling for a buck here and a buck there to accumulate that money, like the job that makes $6/month, times a lot of months and a ton of other hustles like it that made $1 and $2 there, scraped together and hoarded to get me as far as I got so far.
Conversely I solve a bunch of problems with weight distribution and tire sizes by getting the mass more forward and centrally located. The Plan is mount the engine and transmission in the passenger side of the body and squeeze me in as best I fit on the driver’s side and all the main masses are right there in the middle of the car, engine, transmission, and fat-assed driver all in one place. Toss all-wheel drive into that equation and I get a race car that works, pretty much in any weather conditions. As a street car I get twitchy but controllable and decent gas mileage because everything’s covered in bodywork or a bellypan out of the wind. There are still some major compromises to finagle, like getting squeezed to the left by the engine and transmission or widening the body by 10″ so I can sit on the left side of the body with nothing intruding from the drivetrain. I am really divided about this, because on the one side I get comfort and space to spread out, and on the other side I get better gas mileage from reduced aero drag and slightly better handling, and a cozy cockpit that keeps me in place because there’s no room for me to move around 🙂
OK just from a performance standard cramming that engine and transmission into the passenger side of the body and cramming me into whatever space is left over will get both the best handling and the best gas mileage and is a lot less work to produce, so I’ll be seeing if there is enough room left for me after the engine is installed in the unmodified body as soon as I finally get said engine and transmission pulled from the donor vehicle, so basically … never. Even if I get the engine into the body I’m going to have to do a lot of work on the body to be able to service the engine for things like oil changes and tune ups. Because of the computer control tune ups are going to be few and far between and consist of removing the injectors and getting them cleaned or replaced and replacing the spark plugs every 60K miles or so. The most frequent service I’ll be doing is changing the oil and filter every 12 months or 12K miles whichever comes first. But I’ll still need to be able to do it without removing the engine first, so either the body comes off or I have to cut holes in the body where I can get to the oil filter and spark plugs on what is now the front of the engine that will be the right side of the engine as it will be mounted in the car.
And just now on my YTM app it pulled up one of my favorite “go get ’em” pieces, the Emerson Lake and Palmer version of Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man”. That bass line, man it just makes me want figuratively to kick butt and take names. If you haven’t heard it, recently or ever, give it a listen on YouTube. The complete string to enter is “fanfare for common man emerson lake and palmer” don’t even need to use caps or punctuation. This is Montage Music, when I do the video of building the TGS2, this is the music I’m going to play while the pictures flash by.
And it’s about time to put this to bed so I can go there too.
Witch on a Bicycle 