13 Mar Transplant Tuesday
No, we haven’t decided to stray into the medical field, although after years of working on Audi motors, maybe it wouldn’t be too difficult of a switch.
Actually, the transplants that we’re talking about are not the ones you’d find in an operating room. Engine swaps, commonly called transplants, are more towards the extreme end of fabrication. While some motors will, more or less, bolt into the new car without too much worry, some swaps take decidedly more effort and custom metalwork. After all, Hasport probably doesn’t make a set of mounts specifically dedicated to cramming an STi’s boxer motor into a Volkswagen Jetta. Thankfully the two swaps we’ll highlight today aren’t anywhere near that weird, but this first one is still going to be pretty wild. The car you see is a blob-eye WRX with a big ol’ STi wing out back. The motor, however, will not be coming from the ToyoSaabbaru family. Just like many other people looking to swap a weird motor into their car, this gentleman’s chosen an LS-series motor.
Obviously what’s in the engine bay right now won’t be powering the car at the end of this swap — after all, most motors made of solid plastic tend to melt under the high heat required for combustion. This is just a mockup motor, which allows us to mess around with the motor mounts without having to worry about securing hundreds of pounds of cast iron and aluminum. There’s quite a bit of work involved in this swap; namely, we have to raise the motor and tweak the mounts so that the new thinner oil pan can stay above the steering rack. After that first step, there’s a bit more that needs to be done, according to the sheet provided to us with the car. Either way, this is going to get very interesting.
In other transplated-related news, we have a shell that’s in mostly good condition, stripped of everything except a pair of Sparco Evo seats and a steering assembly. What sort of monster could be going into this race car, you ask?
Another LS! Just kidding. It’s the tried-and-true race car swap; one of BMW’s most infamous motors, the S54. Sporting 330 hp and a torque curve that’s flatter than most runway models, this E30 will be putting down more power than BMW’s engineers thought possible at the time, and we can’t wait to have our hands in this. There’s a bit more going into it than just slapping a motor into a shell, so stay tuned for updates on this bad boy, as well.
In news that’s incredibly difficult to link to the theme of transplants, we’ve “transplanted” Mike’s RS6 wheels into the paint room, where they’ve been broken down and painted a lovely shade of black. They’re currently drying, but we’ll have these wheels back on the car by tomorrow afternoon, when local autophotog Matt Magnino will be coming to the shop and we’ll be taking the RS6 out for its first professional photo shoot. After all, as only 1 out of a thousand C5 RS6s ever produced, it deserves a shutter more talented than ours.
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