Had a wild idea today...

 

I've been looking at a way to install axle portals in a soob. Unfortunately, this would result in a need for wheels and tires so large that turning the car could become problematic. The suspension lift that would be required to GET to the point where you could install such a thing would alleviate the problem a bit, but you'd still have HUGE tires under there. But what if you "portaled" the engine?

 

It occured that you could simply add some gear reduction behind the clutch (1.5:1?) and then drive trans with the output from the reduction gear. Torque would effectively go through the roof, but ground speed would come to a crawl.

 

Just a wild thought...

Not a completely crazy idea, unfortunately it does loose one of the major advantages of the portal idea… extra ground clearance, what your left with is extra gear reduction, so lets take that idea and run with it.

 

 

A gear driven flywheel would be difficult to engineer and expensive to build, but it has been done. Back in the day Crown Manufacturing made a geared flywheel kit to reverse the rotation of the Chevy Corvair motor and mount it to the VW transaxle, though it was a 1:1 ratio.

 

You get a similar effect with the divorced transfer case mod, but add front drive complications.

 

I bet for the same or less money and effort as the geared flywheel you could manufacture a steeper set of gears for the D/R tranny.

 

Just a few thoughts

Gary

I was thinking the same thing a while ago, and even had it mocked up in AC. It would use a set of planetaries to keep it inline. But money just wasn't there and I lost interest after that.

 

 

Matt

Jut wondering, but why would you need to huge tires? If you made a gear'd hub like on a hummer, you could replace your stock hub with it, get gear reduction, and a lower output for your wheels. You stick this on a stock, or semi-stock Roo (2" lift?), then put on some standard tires like 27's up to 30's. I see no problem with it. Although you have to work out a way to reverse the output from the tranny's stubs in the front, or else you would be running in reverse in 1st.

Also you run into the whole a gear'd hub from a hummer runs to the tune of 500-2500 semolians for a single unit. Unless of course you frequent military auctions, where you can pick up a whole junker HMMWV for 2-4K.

When using a portaled axle, you end up having to use a large wheel because the whole thing still has to fit inside the wheel along with the brake hardware. Using the stock brake rotor, and assuming a 4" offset in a set of portals, you'd need at least an 18" wheel to fit it in. The only way around this is to figure out a way to keep the portal out of the wheel, but then you'd have to do some seriously wacky fab work.

 

As far as the gear driven flywheel is concerned, that's not really what I had in mind. I would leave the flywheel and clutch mounted directly to the output flange of the crankshaft. There would be a splined shaft that would be driven by the clutch disk, just like the tranny normally would. Then the tranny would be driven off of the output side of the reduction gear. Make sense?

bumper post!