ACEofsnett posted:

Saw this earlier today in a commuter parking lot. Having found his build thread, this is exactly what it appears to be. A VW tdi swapped 1974 Corvette.





It's a pretty brutal swap in execution, but appears to be completely functional.

http://forums.tdiclub.com/showthread.php?t=319973

Edit : My hosting

Cygni posted:

I still don't 'get' time attack.

Cygni posted:

If you're going to go that crazy with aero and engine mods, whats the point of keeping the silhouette body shape of a street car? You could got a hell of a lot faster with a totally ground up aero design, and you are already so far out that any resemblance or relevance to street cars is basically a joke.

Preoptopus posted:

Im bored.

fatman1683 posted:

To be fair, it's not exactly a new concept. I've seen pictures of old open-wheel cars with the exhaust ports on the valley side. Also, Ford's new Powerstroke has the same configuration, and for the same reason: to maximize the efficiency of the turbocharger. Obviously, the shorter the distance between the exhaust port and the turbo, the less energy is lost from the exhaust gasses. This is simply the ultimate realization of that goal.

Also, contrary to the exhaust plumbing being more complex, it's actually simpler when the turbo is in the valley, since you don't have to worry about routing a hot manifold around other engine bay components. The Ford's exhaust manifolds are literally a one-piece casting with a single pipe leading to the turbo inlet. Dead simple, cheap and strong.

It's also a measurable cost savings overall, as it minimizes the amount of tough, high-temperature metal that has to be used. Inlet piping is much thinner, lighter and cheaper than exhaust piping, much easier to route since it doesn't get terribly hot, and less costly to replace if it gets damaged or develops fatigue cracks. You don't have to worry about the exhaust manifold cracking, since it's only connected to the turbo, which is itself attached to the engine, and the whole thing vibrates as one unit.

In short, it's a brilliant idea and I'm surprised it's just now gaining traction among more 'mainstream' vehicles. I expect we'll see a lot of V6s in this configuration replacing V8s in sports and luxury cars in the future.

Preoptopus posted:

They Veyron always seems like its a huge car, but its no bigger than an Audi TT. When you see it up close in person your like, drat.

Motronic posted:

Ford goes through great lengths to bring in Transits as passenger vans (throw away the rear seat belts and seats and weld up the holes where the windows used to be) in order to circumvent the import tax (they build them in Turkey). These do not have beds.

The chicken tax is just as applicable to many Defender specs as it is to Transits.

quote:

Halfway across the stream, there was a crunch and a GRRRRRRIND and my little Freelander came to a halt, steering wheel frozen in place by a log or a rut or the Kraken or something. Immediately I heard advice from both sides of the water. “Go forward! Harder!”

“No, wait! Backwards!”

“We’ll strap you up, hold on!”

“No time for that! You’ll stall the motor! Just DO SOMETHING!” The water in the passenger compartment was three inches high and rising. I was more than ten miles from the nearest trailhead in any direction and more than two hundred miles from home. The recovery would be long, difficult, and expensive. I chose to briefly slam the transmission into reverse and give the miniature V-6 a brief moment of full-throttle before selecting low gear and driving forward into whatever had stopped me before with twice the momentum I’d had previously. Thankfully, this time the obstacle gave way and moments later I was four-wheel-scrabbling for grip up the streambank. A narrow escape. Who’s stupid enough to take a unibody CUV hardcore off-roading? This guy.


Sadly, that’s just one of my “Rover stories”. I have dozens. Maybe more. For eight years I drove a Land Rover of some type on a daily basis, starting with a five-speed ’97 Discovery SD and ending with an ’03 Discovery 4.6 SE. I even tried out a Freelander (mentioned above) in ’02. It was a bad-rear end little trucklet and could go a lot of places — see previous paragraph — but it was a little small and cramped for long trips to BMX or mountain-biking destinations. After a year, I sold it for half what I’d paid and considered myself lucky to get that much. I mean, it had rock scrapes, water damage, crooked bumpers, you name it. I used it hard. Believe it or not, the Rovers were mostly trouble-free. Emboldened by my positive experiences, My father bought a ’99 Rangie and then let me have it when he got tired of driving it around and dealing with the electrical issues. We got almost ninety thousand miles out of that one. Everything else I sold before the warranty expired. Hey, I’m not that stupid.

When my knees got too bad to cycle competitively, I traded in my last Rover on my first Phaeton and never looked back. What’s the point of having a truck that can get you to any trailhead out there if you’re not going to a trailhead anyway? Well, there was more to it than that. I’d driven the new-for-2003 Range Rover and the Discovery-replacing LR3 and hated them. The LR3 was a bland Lego-brick pig that dwarfed the hundred-inch-wagon Discovery while providing almost no additional usable space. It was massively crass both inside and out. And its sibling? My father’s Range Rover had been a civilized, luxurious vehicle; the ’03 was a whorehouse on wheels, a twisted parody of a Range Rover that never truly existed, a white-leather joke wrapped up in a body that resembled the original Rangie the way Adele resembles Audrey Hepburn. When I saw how much they wanted for the thing I was certain that every last one of them would rot on the showroom floor while the cognoscenti beat the bushes for Callaway 4.6 “P38″ Rovers and the motherlode of replacement suspension airbags it would take to drive them until the coming collapse of civilization and beyond.

Boy, was I wrong. Let’s play that game where we pick images that confirm the point we’re trying to make, shall we? Start with this:



And now…



Range Rovers being driven by welfare cases! And by “welfare cases” I mean Queen Elizabeth and the dependably offensive Prince Philip. By contrast, NBA player Stephen Jackson is a taxpayer who contributes to society and brightens the lives of millions through his talent and his commitment to his community. Where was I? Oh yeah. Regardless of Mr. Jackson’s merits as a human being, that Range Rover of his should be nuked from orbit. Both of them, because he has two identical ones. Nuke them both from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

What happened? Well, in 1992 the Land Rover global product range was like so:

Land Rover Defender – A nice coil-spring off-road truck. Like a Jeep Wrangler, only slightly better at doing everything but not breaking. Available in specifications from beach cruiser to military ambulance across three wheelbases.
Land Rover Discovery – A 100-inch-wheelbase family wagon with stellar off-road capabilities and 3/4 ton load capacity. Once I put no fewer than forty-two Compaq tower computers in my Discovery. Another time I loaded it floor to ceiling, rear gate to back of front seats, with cat litter for a local shelter. Didn’t bother the Disco in the slightest. Tough as nails.
Range Rover – All the capability of the Discovery with more luxury and a 108-inch wheelbase variant for rear passenger comfort.
Very easy to understand, right? The Defender is a working truck. The Discovery is a family truck. The Range Rover is an aristocratic truck. All three were body-on-frame trucks with aluminum panels. Have I repeated TRUCK enough for you? Good. They were trucks.

In the thirty-some years during which the original two generations of the Range Rover were sold, the vehicle acquired quite a bit of social credibility, as did its owners. The prestige that came from owning a Range Rover had to do with the assumption that one owned property, or participated in a lifestyle, which required the Range Rover’s capabilities. The original Range Rovers were not terribly luxurious vehicles. They were terribly capable vehicles. That was the sales pitch. Go anywhere. Do anything. Let the proles squat on the concrete slabs; we’re off to the country estate. There was no reason for that pitch to change. In fact, with the increasingly active lifestyle enjoyed by our overlords in the fabled one percent, one could argue that the market for Land Rovers of all types could only increase.

Instead, the serial custodians of the brand — BMW, Ford, and now Tata — decided to milk the brand for all the “prestige” it could provide while slowly letting the product wander into irrelevance. Let’s look at the lineup now:

The Defender. You can still get this in some markets. Until they drop it. Which will be any day now. And of course the Wrangler with which it competes has been completely revised three times since the Defender was released. Everything the Defender has ever had, the Wrangler has now, plus more.
The LR2. This replaced the Freelander, which was a Honda Civic (I’m not kidding) hacked-up to create a kind of low-cost all-weather wagon. It was cheap and capable enough in bad conditions. The LR2, by contrast, costs forty grand and can’t go everywhere the Freelander could go, because it’s bigger.
The LR4. Lipstick on the decade-old pig known as the LR3. The most charmless station wagon in history. Monstrously sized, hugely thirsty, too big to be useful off-road. It’s simply offensive. I wouldn’t want to be seen in one. Better to drive a Suburban. At least you can put something big in a Burb, like a drumset and two groupies.
The Range Rover Sport. What’s the point of this? It looks like a Range Rover. But underneath it’s an LR4. It’s cheaper than a Range Rover. But it weighs more. And it’s not supposed to go off-road. Because a Range Rover without off-road capabilities is just as useful and desirable as a Porsche truck, no doubt to the same loathsome people.
That’s all just kind of sad to people who love Land Rovers the way I used to, but I’m not willing to call for the death penalty yet, Your Honor. Let’s focus on the real villains. Start with the “Range Rover Evoque”. It’s a RAV4 for people who could afford two RAV4s but for some reason only want to have one. What possible reason in the world could one have to buy this thing, other than to try to convince one’s neighbors that one can afford a Range Rover? It looks like it’s been squashed. Whatever giant creature tried to squash it should come back and finish the job. It’s not a Range Rover. I know it, you know it, your daughter’s friends know it. You’re embarrassing yourself. Nobody is fooled by this. It’s the perfect “Range Rover” for people who wear imitation Rolexes and Photoshop their LinkedIn profile pictures to remove their moles. And I know you call it the “Range Rover” when you’re referring to it at parties. Because “front-wheel-drive mommy-wagon with a thyroid condition” just doesn’t pack the same punch. “Oh, we were driving the Range Rover the other day…” No you weren’t. Stephen Jackson was driving the Range Rover the other day. You were driving a CX-5 as reimagined by a PCP addict with two crayons, a Burger King wrapper, and access to a recent issue of “The DuPont Registry”.

What’s worse than a fake Range Rover? The All New Real Range Rover. It’s advertised on Land Rover’s own website like so:



Putting that photo up where PEOPLE CAN SEE IT is approximately as stupid as me posing topless with “Marky Mark” Wahlberg and making sure every single mother in America between the ages of 22 and 35 gets a copy of the photo in her mailbox tomorrow. I would think most people in 2012 would say, “Hey, can I get the smaller vehicle with more ground clearance and more tasteful styling? How much more does that one cost?” I have a better idea for the ad:



No, wait. Looking at that photo just makes me want to buy another Flex, which can be had with all the same stuff a Range Rover has, plus a twin-turbo engine, for $40,000 less. Maybe a Flex isn’t any good off-road, whereas the Range Rover has had all sorts of wonderful press trips in remote and exotic locations where a group of trained experts who could get a Gallardo through the Rubicon Trail talk journalists through carefully stage-managed experiences, but does it really matter any more? Who’s going to take that piggy, ribbed-for-nobody’s-pleasure Range Roaster off-road? Who’s going to put muddy boots inside it? Who’s going to put it four feet deep in a Pennsylvania creek for laughs?

The current Land Rover range has no relevance whatsoever. The brand has no relevance whatsoever. Any prestige or pride in ownership one might possibly feel from owning a Rover is surely mitigated by the Tata ownership and the never-ending parade of douchebags “flossing” them on MTV and double-parking them outside Whole Foods. The outlandish size, weight, and consumption of the entire range, pun intended, is an affront to any notion of sustainable co-existence with the wild outdoors on which the brand built its tarnished image. Inside and out, the vehicles are gross parodies of their ancestors and not worth considering for a moment by anyone with a smidgen or taste or decency. Time to close the doors, sell the remaining stock to the Chinese, and slink away quietly.

The saddest part of all this? The market for the original Rovers — the genuine article — still exists, you know. One of my dearest friends works as an attorney in a rural area, making good money and restoring a beautiful century-old home. She likes to visit her family back home in Iowa and drive the unpaved roads there. We are planning on hiking up Mount Elbert in the summer, and in order to start from the highest trailhead you need something with four-wheel-drive and nontrivial ground clearance. For that and a variety of other reasons, she decided to buy herself a new truck. She wanted a rugged, all-purpose vehicle that would allow her to go anywhere. She wanted to keep it for a long time. She wasn’t terribly concerned about what it cost, although she’s a Midwesterner at heart so she appreciates value.

The vehicle she chose does everything a Land Rover should be able to do, and more. It wasn’t cheap, but it’s worth the money. And we saw other people driving them. People of all types. She waves at them. She loves “Serenity”, her new Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Sahara six-speed manual, the way I loved my Land Rovers. During a recent weekend, we gleefully drove it up and down steep grass hills and even down a small set of stairs at an abandoned office park. “It seems like this Jeep can go anywhere!” she exclaimed.

“Sure, but let’s keep it out of deep water, okay?”

Ridge_Runner_5 posted:

BMW M6 converted to a GAZ-21 for some reason...

VikingSkull posted:

200 years being used as is now? Or 200 years of supplying a fleet of tens of millions of road cars?

General_Failure posted:

oooooh scary. No it's not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogas

We don't have LPG cars exploding all over the place. Ours hasn't killed me. not even once!
CNG is a slightly different affair having a lower energy density still, but the systems are designed with safeguards and the tanks are pretty much bulletproof.

It's not my fault that the majority of the U.S. is scared of LPG, CNG, Diesel and Metric.

General_Failure posted:

The vast majority of them. It's pretty rare to see them not carry it. Although at the current time it's not the most popular fuel because even premium works out cheaper in $/km. They blame the LPG price hikes on international bs, but as far as I know LPG is locally sourced.

Throatwarbler, it's pretty much been a perfected technology for a while now. I can't really comment on CNG but LPG costs ~$1-2000 to be retrofit for a mixer ring setup and ??? for liquid / gas injection. If I go back in time before the last year or so, if I were to get gas fitted it would have paid for itself in a few months.

You can lose space, yes. It depends on where the tank is mounted and whether the vehicle is a total conversion or dual fuel. Total conversion a tank can be mounted where the original fuel tank was. Depending on the vehicle design sometimes the tank can go between the frame rails, under a tray or whatever. There are also smaller tanks which can be fitted instead of a spare tyre.

As said the tanks are strong, plus there is a dual solenoid setup, tachometric relay and I don't know what else. If the vehicle is demolished to the point an LPG tank is ruptured odds are the occupants are dead anyway.

Preoptopus posted:

Aurune posted:

Christian really loves his cars. Some more close ups of the rear suspension layout.

http://i.imgur.com/Of6vb.jpg


http://i.imgur.com/FSpZO.jpg


Edit: VV If you ever get the honor of meeting him in person. He'll talk you ear off about any detail you like. Awesome guy. VV

Devyl posted:

Brand new you're looking at around 95k plus dealer mark-up. Depending on the alignment of the stars and planets, you can get an '09 or '10 model for around $50,000 used. I want one so bad too. Yeah, it's becoming the big thing here in the states to find top-tier athletes in extreme sports and shove them in a Subaru/Ford on a rally course to get big profits. Of course, there's also the video game sponsorships. For example Vaughn Gitten Jr. and his role in NFS:S2. Great game, but you can't bypass the screens of him talking and plastered in Ford & Falken logos. Of course he does drift and was never an extreme sports athlete, but you get where I'm going with this.

Seat Safety Switch posted:

How do you even mount an engine like that without shaking the foundation apart? I can't imagine an inline 14 is well balanced.

Tekne posted:

Makes sense when they've been sporting the filter feeder look longer than anyone else.

The 177's V12 is a monster, but I wonder how it would fare against the SRT Viper's V10 if they were placed in identical vehicles. While it has a clear horsepower advantage, the pushrod has more torque, which is available throughout most of its rpm range.

Fucknag posted:

4 cylinders are still somewhat imbalanced, though. At any given point, 2 cylinders have valves open, so they're balanced, but of the other two one is just starting compression and the other is firing. So there's a strong downward force, which should be balanced by compression, except the compression doesn't become noticeable until the piston's about halfway up so you still feel the shock - it's most obvious in larger motors, which is why you generally don't see 4-pots over 2.3L on a regular basis, 3L being the upper limit from what I remember. With 6 cylinders and up, there is a cylinder under compression to balance the combustion impulse in addition to the piston which is just starting its upward travel, so they balance out better.

MrChips posted:

I thought all those gigantic diesels were (are?) two-stroke, which pretty much throws 4-stroke balancing out the window.

Sockington posted:

Agreed.

Some none-balance shaft big bore 4bangers that come to mind;
- Nissan KA24E /KA24DE (2.4L SOHC / DOHC)
- Subaru EJ25 (2.5L SOHC)

Definitely well refined engines when vibrations and noises are considered.

rscott posted:

Didn't Porche put a 3.0L I4 in the 944? How did they keep that thing from shaking itself apart?

Linedance posted:

Seen while wandering through Chelsea on the way back from a restaurant.



750i v12, Alpina wheels. Slick.