Spent a lot of time doing research and saving pictures

Well, after my walk and reading e-mails I spent a lot of time reading from this archive where a dude in the UK is swapping a 3.3 into a Neon. Where it works for me is externally the 3.3 and the 3.8 are identical. What makes this particular swap helpful for me is the dude was obsessive about documenting the build with photographs. So I have 4 really good views, one of each side of the engine/transmission assembly, that can be used to help plan the back half of the Mid-Bucket.

This is what they look like coming out of the donor vehicle.

OK, it looks like the front and rear mounts are going to go on the tube from the center of the rear hoop to the watt’s link behind the engine, and the left and right mounts will be connected to the frame by tubes running from the rear suspension shock mounts and the outside lower corner of the rear roll hoop. I need to figure out one more way to brace those mounts as they look to be weak in the vertical direction on the frame side, engine side looks fine if a bit heavy. The front and rear mounts are fine vertically but will need bracing left to right and back and forth. I seriously don’t want the engine hitting me in the back if I hit something from the front, so the mounts will be very strong to prevent that from happening. The front mount will be very low on the frame and it looks like just making the mounting plates to the frame heavy enough will do that if I brace that mount against the rear hoop as well as the tube running down the center of the frame. I’m half tempted to just make the mounts from plate stock and leave the rubber bits out so I can get a massage while I’m driving. 😈 But I will probably use one of these at each mount (or two kits). I’m extremely tempted to mount the front cushion at 45° to help keep the engine off my back in a wreck.

And I’m out of words after spending too much time researching this.

Billed @€0.02, Opus the fat but Unkillable

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With new data I have a new weight estimate

One of the things I do when I’m not running around, or writing, or reading web comics or e-mail, is try to get better information about the weights of the stuff I’m putting in or taking out of the Mid-Bucket. The bad news is my transaxle weighs more than I originally estimated, and the parts of the axle I’m leaving out because the car is mid-engine don’t weigh as much as I originally estimated. What it breaks down to is the weight estimate went up by about 50 pounds to 1550 total. Almost all of that 50 came from the rear axle. Still absurdly light by most standards.

Where I might make up a few pounds is the de Dion truss replacing the heavy axle housing of the front engine car, but since those run only about 38 pounds it won’t be much. If my initial estimate on the truss is right, and I know it’s close, then the most I can save would be about 13 pounds. That is all unsprung weight loss which means better handling for the Mid-Bucket.

Something else I have been trying to solve is how to get the fiberglass bucket body and the engine/transmission installed inside the exoskeleton style frame. There is a lot of triangulation round the back area that blocks access to the engine which if I made removable would open up a hole wider than the body to let it go in after painting. Then drop in the engine and transmission and bolt the bracing back in. And once again I’m wanting to do a Copy/Paste from my brain so you can see what I see in my mind. Basically there will be two sections of bracing to bolt in, one from the rear hoop to the rear shock mounts and across the back, and another one bracing the rear hoop from side to side and top to bottom. I may break down and start sketching this out with pencil and paper again and taking pictures with my cell phone, like I did a few years ago when I first started documenting this process.

The tricky part is I still don’t have the donor vehicle to copy the engine and transmission mounts from. I do know that the roll hoop bracing is where about half of the mounts will go, the rest will go on the main frame assembly. I have seen pictures of the transmission mounts so that’s how I know how they will go.

And I apparently forgot to save that picture of the mounts and I can’t find it again in Google Images either. Silly me.

Well it is getting late and I still have to clear the garbage out of my e-mail inbox. And I guess I should mention I had to miss playing Shadowrun today because my allergies gave me digestive issues, as in “don’t get too far from a toilet” issues followed by the worse gas pains I have ever had. And when I was at the lab rat keeper’s office this week I asked to hear what my body fat percentage was and promptly swore off eating for the next several months when they told me more than 30%. That works out to just over 70 pounds (32 Kg) of fat I’m carting around, which means I need to lose about 45 pounds (20 Kg) of it to get to a healthy body fat percentage. That will pull me down to about 165 to 170. That won’t happen overnight because losing that much weight that quick without weight training to maintain muscle mass will result in my going back to my eating disorder days when I got to 170 and so weak I couldn’t get out of bed. I know what I need to do and that is to work out at a “fat burning” pace for about 8 hours a day, and do some light weights 3 days a week. I did this when I was training for the Hotter’n’Hell Hundred a few years ago and I can do it again. I got down under 200 for that in about 4 months. I need to build something that I can work at the fat burning pace when I’m working at the computer and watching TV, a recumbent exercise cycle with a desk so I don’t hurt my butt.

Billed @€0.02, Opus the fat but Unkillable