Thread: VW rat rods? whats up?

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Hey, no offense intended here, VWs are nostalgic for me and it might be fun to build a really big engine with the latest available parts, but I wonder if anybody out there has a VW with a Corvair engine? My younger brother had a '60 Porsche coupe with the smaller 110 H.P. Corvair engine and the engine cover would just barely close over it. It had the bad property of suddenly throwing the contents of the glove compartment into the back seat upon acceleration in low gear! Now that was a sleeper and perhaps a precursor to the Porsche flat-six models. Of course the engine rotation is reversed and the "right" way is to buy expensive rear gears, but the easy way was to merely flip the ring gear over and it worked pretty well. Another way is to buy a reverse-camshaft and run the engine backwards but I do not recall if the there were piston pin offsets that had to be changed, so it was easiest to flip the ring gear in the transaxle and let the engine run as it was designed. I guess Corvair engines are scarce today, but If I were building a VW today I would look hard for a Corvair engine. It was an interesting play on words in the movie "The Thomas Crown Affair" (the first one with Steve McQueen) because in that movie there was a dune buggy based on a VW pan with a Corvair engine and no doubt using a "Crown Adapter". What this thread needs is a picture of a VW with a Corvair engine! Maybe someone on this Forum has a picture of the Thomas Crown Dune Buggy (some folks on this Forum have some amazing pictures!)? Still no offense intended, at one time or another I rebuilt or replaced every part on a pre-SuperBug ('60-'66) except to rebuild the magical wunderbox transaxle so I have about 20 years of VW memories. Just reminiscing.

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder