I want to build a front wheel drive BEC based on a road going car such as a Vauxhall Corsa or VW Golf so if you can help me with any info on how to make it I would really apreciate it
HERE IS MY IDEA, I´m from Colombia in south america and want to build some nice cars to make a small racing championship, the racing in Colombia is not like Europe or USA here is really a low budget racing with no fans watching, so I don´t really care about the performance of the car either way I think that a 160 HP engine would be a much better than the 65 HP street of the corsa, the reason that I want it to be a bike engine is that they sound great, have secuential gearboxes, and work at high RPM all of these is really important for us to get some fans coming, I want to do it on Road going cars becouse is the only way that peple will really see their cars look like the racing ones and so we can get suport from diferent factorys in colombia.
I want to thank all of you for your help.
by the way I think the car would be around 750 KG tops as it wont have rear seat Air conditioned and many street extras that weights a lot


[Edited on 24/2/03 by lince12]

Unless you use a seriously powerful (extremely expensive) bike engine, the performance would surely be severely clipped by the weight of the donor chassis?

My first response is "Why?" OK, I know, if you'd wanted a Mini, you'd have gone and bought one.
In practical terms, there's no reason why you can't do it. BEC Locosts are notoriously light in the front anyway!
I would aim to fit the engine behind the front axle line, so you'd have to take a couple of quick measurements to make sure it would all fit, but there are three possibilities as I see it:

1/ Mount the engine so its sprocket is facing the front of the car, and run a short coupling to an inverted independant diff.
The main drawback with this method would be that the majority of the engine's weight would be on the same side as the driver (RH drive).

2/ Mount the engine as in a "conventional" BEC, and drive a diff via a jack shaft running directly behind the engine, which in turn would be driven off the engine by chain.
This method would result in most of the engine weight being on the near side, and the jack shaft would be no heavier than a conventional prop shaft.

3/ Mount the engine so as it's facing the rear, and chain drive the crown wheel of a suitably orientated diff.
This is probably the easiest and cheapest alternative. If you were to use a Golf diff, I know for a fact, they can be mounted in a couple of 30mm (?) bearings, within a spun case/oil bath. Then you have a very wide choice of axles to choose from, as IIRC, there were several variants of Golf, and combine that with the one long shaft, and one short shaft they have, and you should be able to pick out some shafts without having to modify them!
I think some of the GTI Golfs had a slippy dif too (at least a mate's did, though he may have fitted a Quaiffe or similar).
I haven't seen one in the flesh, but I believe some of the Mazda and Toyota sports cars have light slippy diffs which could be adapted.
I think I have some CAD drawings of this sort of set-up somewhere.
That's just off the top of my scone, I'm sure other ideas will spring to mind.

Personally, I wouldn't bother, just because they go well in locosts doesn't mean they're the be all and end all of performance engines. You'd be better of doing a twin engine install, which despite being very difficult, would probably be easier that trying to fettle a bike engine into the front of a comparatively heavy car and make it go. Get a golf VR6 with tons of miles on the clock, bin the engine, get a couple of 1.8Ts or a couple of 4A-GZE, and slap those in the front and back.

Or just buy/build a locost, it would be infinitley easier, and have better handling too.

One thing I've always fancied doing is building a completely new chassis for a VW polo, putting the original bodywork on, and slapping a toyota V8 or something similar in the back, for a nice mid engine polo.

Anyway, enough of my ranting

Kingr

Any kind of regular car chassis (bar a mini) is way too heavy for a BEC install. To get reasonable performance out of a BEC install, the whole car needs to weigh 500kgs at most. The lightest you will ever get something like a Corsa is probably 800kgs+.
I agree with the above, if you want a bike engine in a car, install it in something sensible and light, if you want a fast Corsa/Golf, drop in a fast car engine(s)

Chris

I obviously didn't read the original post at all! I missed the whole Corsa/Golf bit. I just read BEC, and assumed Sevenesque.


Yup, any BEC, even with a Busa, much over 500kgs, will destroy the engine/clutch pretty quickly.

FWD?

Oh no, no, no, no,no.

Nurse! Help!