Robbie (Forum Supporter) said:Wait the fiat CVs bolted to the VW flanges? Or the fiat splines fit the VW trans?
That is indredible either way!
The flanges are just plain ole 100mm 6 bolt european CV flanges. The X1/9 has the same six bolt telescoping CV joints on both ends of each axle. The only difference is that FIAT decided that the centering lip present on the VW flanges was not necessary. The later VR transmissions went to a 108mm flange that also used larger bolts.
rozap said:
The "ODIO FIAT" sticker is kinda cute. I assume that "odio" in Italian means the same thing that it does in Spanish, "I hate."
For those not in the know, the sticker is a reference to this:
Maybe we'll end up building our own linkage, but it'll be helpful to have the box either way to experiment with. Though given this is my first swap, I'm going to try to lean heavily on off the shelf parts for simplicity, where it makes sense.
And yea, the ODIO FIAT sticker is a play on the old livery which was on the 037, as well as other things. There is an Italian speaker on our lemons team, and they described odio as in between "hate" and "berkeleying hate". 
Unfortunately I need to pause on this project for a bit. I was replacing the valve cover gasket on the Corrado this weekend and found this little treasure within. So the engine is now out of that car and will be getting new chains, among other things. I'm lucky I found it when I did, but I wasn't planning on this project. 
Waiting on parts for the corrado, so had some time to make an exhaust. It's 2.5" through the cheapest muffler I could find. The only requirement is that it's easy to install and uninstall, which it is.
Thanks to matthewmcl, i now have an 02a shift box to experiment with.
I'm interested to see this project move forward. As I said over in my thread, VR6 thoughts occasionally creep back in when I think about the 8VT.
You're probably as good a person as any to ask: do you know the difference in length, bell housing flange to front pulley, of the VR vs. the EA827?
GasTungstenArc said:You're probably as good a person as any to ask: do you know the difference in length, bell housing flange to front pulley, of the VR vs. the EA827?
I don't. I don't have a EA827 that I could measure. I could measure the VR6 though.
I'll hopefully get back to this project in a few weeks after decompressing from the lemons race this past weekend at the ridge. The weeks leading up to it were a little hectic. After revisiting the telemetry we collected, and seeing all the coolant temperature spikes, I suspected a head gasket failure on the engine in the car, so we started prepping a spare engine about two weeks before the race. It had no compression in one cylinder, which turned out to be a valve that wasn't seating. New rings, bearings and we did the valves and guides. It went together with no issues.
Then I finally did a coolant test on the engine in the car, and lo and behold, the head gasket was toast. So a week before the race we do the swap.
Put the new engine in and it fires up for a second and immediately dies. Turns out it's just running off the cold start injector. I back probe one of the injectors, stick the scope on it and, who can spot the issue
Took the injectors off the old motor and all was well. I guess sitting for 18 years caused the pintels to seize. Crisis averted, with a week until the race. New motor ran much better than the old. When I pulled the catch can that had been filled by the old motor, it was full of water.
So we got to the ridge with a running car that had barely been broken in, and had our best race yet with 257 laps. We had one minor failure, where the car started misfiring at around 5000 RPM. I noticed that the misfire changed when the throttle position changed, so we suspected throttle position sensor. We swapped that and were back out within 10 minutes, and the problem was fixed. We also had brake issues, due to us not bedding the pads properly. And then driver screwups led to two penalties.
Despite finishing mid pack, we were the second slowest car in outright pace. The car is plenty quick in the corners, but horrible on the straights. So, more motivation to work on this swap.
Doing some brainstorming on how to add more cooling to this. Since it'll be mostly running at WOT for hours on end, I'd prefer to overdo it on the cooling. I'm thinking a second small radiator to supplement the radiator up front, which is from a scirocco and is a bit bigger than the stock one, but it's just about the biggest one we can fit up there.
Maybe a small radiator from a geo metro plumbed in parallel with the existing radiator? I would have liked something longer and skinnier, but this is the only thing the junkyard was able to provide.
Maybe this is a bad idea and it makes more sense to do something else. If I go this route, I'll rejigger the muffler to be farther away.
The main advantage of putting another radiator here is that we can then make a duct to the radiator inspired by the abarth prototipo
I also cut up that shift box that matthewmcl sent me, in order to reverse everything. It'll work, and the cables should be long enough once I cut holes to route them properly. Yes it's ugly, but this is lemons.
Also, saw this at the junkyard, for sale, in one piece with a manual transmission. It was incredibly straight. Or you could make a lemons car out of it.
If the original is Window 98, will you change the livery to XP or one of the lightweight Linux distroes once it's faster with the VR6?
Pics in the last post don't work?
classicJackets (FS) said:Pics in the last post don't work?
Weird. Re-uploaded.
Don't jeep Cherokee radiators work really well in rear engine cars where the radiator is left up front?
They are wide and really short.
Either way, you will dramatically increase cooling with a single airpath to and from the radiator. Duct the crap out of it!
Added some tabs to the transmission support to hold the shift cables in place. The notch is to make room for 1st and 2nd, and the same notch is on the equivalent corrado piece, which I thought was endearing. All gears are selectable now.
For supplementary cooling, I'm going to run the heater circuit to the small radiator, like so.
Small update:
Not much material progress has happened over the last month or so. We've mostly been planning our next steps.
I'm not happy at all with the sleeved axle I mocked up, so we're going to try to make them the real way. I've ordered an indexing wheel, which will also be required for the crank wheel, because we made the decision to drop the OEM ECU and go with a speeduino. After a few junkyard runs, and watching row52, it became apparent that the AFP is much more readily available than the AAA, and while most of the engine components are the same, all the electronics are different. Also the swap from distributor to coilpack in 93 and from OBD1 to OBD2 in 95 further narrows parts availability, so a standalone setup will serve us much better as we'll be able to mix and match. Also eventually we'll want to blow the car up with forced induction. So I ordered a kit from WMTronics and assembled it. Picture taken before we got it hooked up to tunerstudio and realized we soldered the MAP sensor on upside down. The committee apologizes and regrets the error.
When I got into racing, I ended up becoming room mates with a two brothers that raced an X1/9. They started with a stock 1300 Fiat engine, but eventually progressed to doing a lot of speed mods. They ended having to do a lot of things to keep it running, like O-ringing the block so the head gaskets wouldn't constantly blow. I think you just dropping something more powerful in is a much better strategy.
If I recall correctly, they just used the stock radiator with a double core and better ducting. It's my opinion that adding a second radiator in the trunk area may not be that effective. I also knew some guys that raced Fiat 850s, and they moved the radiators up front because the rear cooling was so problematic. You could try radiators on the front corners, like Boxsters or Caymans.
Curious why you have such a tall roll bar that sticks up above the roof. If you are able have the stock roof line, your aero drag will be greatly reduced and you'll be faster. The way things are now you have a roof-sized air brake slowing you down everywhere.
Where are you south of Olympia? I live in Seattle, but my daughter lives in Centralia.
If I recall correctly, they just used the stock radiator with a double core and better ducting. It's my opinion that adding a second radiator in the trunk area may not be that effective. I also knew some guys that raced Fiat 850s, and they moved the radiators up front because the rear cooling was so problematic. You could try radiators on the front corners, like Boxsters or Caymans.
Yea, the more I'm playing around with things, the more I think we may mount a second radiator up front, with a vent out the hood. I guess we'd just block off the heater loop.
Curious why you have such a tall roll bar that sticks up above the roof. If you are able have the stock roof line, your aero drag will be greatly reduced and you'll be faster. The way things are now you have a roof-sized air brake slowing you down everywhere.
The rules require 2" of helmet clearance between you and the roll bar. We had someone who is 6'5" who originally planned to be on the team, but then he bailed before the first race. We built it to accommodate him, so that's why it looks so goofy. It's really not ideal, but I don't want to remake the cage for aero gains on a car that isn't really ever going to be particularly competitive in a series where it's really just about having fun. The roof (also required by rules..) could be lowered to reduce drag though.
Where are you south of Olympia? I live in Seattle, but my daughter lives in Centralia.
I'm just outside of Lacey, in the evergreen valley area.
Small amount of progress. Started on homebrew coilovers and camber plates, and figured out a plan for a dual master cylinder setup. These upgrades will be done by our next race on April 4th, but the motor swap won't be done by then. In any case, sorting out the suspension and brakes are on the critical path to having a bigger engine in the car. The pedal feel was horrible before, and got even worse once we enlarged the front calipers to a set off of a new fiat 500, so the master cylinder just needs more volume. I wish it was just a brake bleeding issue, but it's just how X1/9's are with the sliding wedge calipers. At some point we need to upgrade the rears as well to a modern design.
We're increasing the spring rates to 250/350 from 180/220, but reusing the same koni dampers. I found a $50 honda civic lowering kit on amazon, and am going to use the sleeves from the kit. Any other place wanted like $75 per sleeve, which was silly. So I made some bushings out of some tube, which will get welded in place once I get the springs and figure out where everything sits. Front and rear dampers after I cut the old spring perches off and did some lathing on the lathe.
Also, stitched together some clips from the previous race, with the obligatory initial D eurobeat soundtrack.
It might be a stupid idea if mine. But how about some snowmobile inline radiator. You could probably run 2 inline after the radiator
rozap said:
Love the build so far!
Is that an IBM Model M keyboard?
In reply to RandolphCarter :
Sure looks like one. Are they worth something now?
OHSCrifle said:In reply to RandolphCarter :
Sure looks like one. Are they worth something now?
According to ebay, they're worth anywhere from 45 to 1000 dollars.
Yea, it is. That's at my teammate's place. Their house is like a computer museum. Tons of cool stuff.
A bit of progress this weekend. Finished up the DIY coilovers and camber plates. They are installed in the car and look like they'll work. We were running way too much negative camber at the previous race, and completely destroyed the insides of the front tires. In my head this is because we made the car 20mm wider (10mm spacers on each side) and are running 195s and the stock is tire is 165. So we'll need to dial it back a bit if we want to use all the tire. And we paid for the whole tire, so I want to use the whole tire. I'm excited to for the stiffer springs. In theory, natural frequency should be around 2hz.
Started on the brake improvements. Our plan is to punch a hole in the front bulkhead and run a rod out the front to a dual master cylinder setup accessible from the frunk. The stock placement has a single 3/4" master cylinder mounted in the depths of hell. Like, it's buried above the driver foot well and is a huge pain to service. The current brake feel is horrible because of the larger calipers. We'll use two 3/4" master cylinders, and make sure we haven't been skipping leg day in the runup to the races. We'll (hopefully) have some adjustability in the lever to give us more or less mechanical advantage if we need it.
Me (an intellectual) trying a new thing called planning, in which I actually put the pieces that I order from mcmaster into a model rather than ordering the wrong stuff 3x times. We'll see how it works
. 
Shoot I wish I'd seen this earlier. I have a couple 911 shifter boxes that would have worked out good for the transmission. I only need one so you if you like you can have the other one. Been a fiat head since I was 16. Yeah I know I'm a bit of a masochist but damn I loved the sound of those double cam 1.8 in the coupes and spiders. Not to sure but I may have some left over VR6 parts from a Passat my brother owned and got left to me after he moved to Japan. I bounce around for work from Tacoma to Seattle mostly. I have a bunch of bit's and pieces for mainly 124 but there are some mechanical parts that do swap. There yours if you want them.
Nothing to add here but my first car was a 74 fiat X1/9, and I'm in Seattle, and also happy to help out with any greasy bits if you want assistance anywhere.
LifeIsStout said:Nothing to add here but my first car was a 74 fiat X1/9, and I'm in Seattle, and also happy to help out with any greasy bits if you want assistance anywhere.
There seems to be a pretty big Seattle contingent on GRM, maybe sometime after the April 1st race there could be a gathering for Fiat enjoyers out at the farm.
Anyone who knows, knows:
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