I always enjoy watching shows on TV or watching Youtube time lapse footage that make things look so easy with a bit of editing, but the reality with any custom car project is that small victories are easily turned into enthusiasm to keep you going to the next small victory.
The small victory for this part of the story is that due to the unusual engine and gearbox choice, we needed to be able to mate the two together before we can design a clutch, then make engine and gearbox mounts to support the whole beast once it’s in place. Following on from that means we can start with the intake manifold, exhaust manifolds and rest of the exhaust system and driveshafts.
Now it’s certainly not a complicated part, but as you can see from the above list, it is very important to the overall project. Another thing that’s often overlooked is the requirement for the adaptor to be very accurate as if the adaptor plate is out even slightly, it means that the gearbox and in turn items such as the clutch and gearbox input shafts won’t line up as they need to and there’s no room for slack anywhere in that chain so we can’t get this wrong. Luckily the bolt pattern from Mercedes and Mendeola were fairly simple. In fact the Mendeola is actually based on a standard Volkswagen / Porsche pattern that is very commonly used and very easy to transfer to the adapter plate. We decided to go with a steel plate to start with since we had some steel we could source easily to get started, but we plan on transferring to an aluminium one later on after we’re sure it’s all good. The steel one weighs a fair bit and we need to try and keep the weight over the rear end down where we can.
Visually it’ll be cool too to finally see how the engine will look jammed into there !!
There’s a newer entry in this story, please click here – FZ12 – Part 9
If you’ve missed the last part of our story then click here FZ12 – Part 7
or if you want to go right to the beginning then click here FZ12 – Part 1
