The Project Begins
I made some progress this weekend. I had my Daytona towed from my old house to my new place. About 35 miles away. You’re probably asking yourself about now... I thought this was going to be a 2.4 into an Omni? heh, the Daytona is a donor. I needed the A523 manual transmission out of it for this project. So I got the engine/tranny out of the Daytona pretty quickly. I snagged the big 11” brake setup off the Daytona while I had it apart, maybe I can adapt them to the Omni. I also grabbed the clutch cable, shifter and shift cables. Oh man.. Let me tell you what.. Booger Bushings are a BITCH to remove! I damn near destroyed my shifter trying to pry the cables off of it. Finally got out the razor knife and made several slices in the top of each bushing and they finally came off.
The Project Begins
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Here are both blocks. The good old 2.5L 8valve “common” block on the left. And the 2.4L 16v DOHC block on the right. I appologize for my poor photography. I should have tried to get the angle the same on both pictures. Ahh well. Some amazing things.. The flywheel swaps right over, bolts right up to the different motor. The transmission bolts to the new engine, 3 of the 4 main bolts bolt right in. The 4th bolt will be real easy to adapt, see the picture below.
So here’s what I’m thinking about doing with this boss mismatch. The transmission has a bolt hole above it, and a bolt hole below it. So I take a 1/4” thick 1” wide bar of steel, just long enough to reach from one bolt hole to the next. Drill a hole at each end of the bar for bolts to pass through. Place the bar over this boss on the block, install bolts through it into the tranny. That should do the trick. There is also a bracket on the back of the block for another bolt on the tranny, that bracket lines up with another bolt hole perfectly. I didn’t take a picture of it.
One more shot here to see the transmission bolt to the 2.4L block. This is an A523, out of my Daytona (well, out of a Dodge Shadow long ago). It’s a ’90 A523 with 3.5fd, I loved how much this dropped my freeway RPM’s compared to the 3.85fd 523 I had before this one. Anyways, next up is the picture of the starter installed. It’s really astounding if you think about this, the starter was on the FRONT of this block.. Now it’s on the BACK! And it fits! So this engine not only bolts up to the wrong transmission, but once that tranny is on, the wrong starter in the wrong place works too. I love it! I knew this already, I had read that this would work, so it shouldn’t have been a
And this is the last picture. I bolted the starter on. I don’t have a flywheel bolted to the engine yet, I test fitted the flywheel, but left it off while I test fitted the transmission, and starter. I’m pretty happy with how things are working out so far. I’ll probably be tearing apart the Omni in the next week or two. Stay tuned. Please email me with any comments or questions.
shock, but ya know, I just don’t believe everything I read, I had to see it for myself. (Hence all the pictures today, I want to share the results)
