I would have liked to have sprayed the HHR for you. Unfortunately I don't have any equipment since I retired. And I have swapped a lot of engines in my day. In the barn, under a tree, etc.

Here is a 1972 Mustang I rear clipped. It was totaled in the rear. I bought a rear clip and made a nice car out of it. Front was an ugly brown and rear clip was an ugly green. To me that only meant paint it red.



This doesn't even compare to what you are doing with the HHR but it was fun to do and I learned a lot.

Boydie

 

Gee I like the roof mounted antennae, my '35 Buick and '39 Chevy and my '48 Buick all had roof mounted antennae, and that was way before any Euro rides showed up here

 

With almost 35k hits on this thread so far and lots of great feed back from you guys to help me with the build, I have decided to start a new thread. It will be titled "V8 HHR Build" I'm done with the mule and I've got a pretty good idea of the path I'll take from here. With your continued input, I think this will work. The main components of the conversion are complete and are being powder coated now. It will be ready for the actual "build" in about a week. I'll include lots of close up pics of the sub frame and suspension along with measurements in case anyone is fool enough to follow me. I give a huge amount of credit to Unique and YearOne for proof-of-concept that a V8 will fit in a HHR. Had either of these companies been given more than the ridicules 6 week time frame to build something that had never been attempted before, I'm sure they could have gotten most of the problems solved. The direction I have chosen is based on YearOne's front suspension/engine/steering design, however, I don't think their tube rear frame is strong enough for long term use as a daily driver. There is no way that my attempt at this conversion will be the definitive way to do this. I encourage everyone to suggest ways that I can make this better. You can't imagine how much I enjoy your feed back. The administrators of this site have been kind enough to keep this thread in the General section of the site. Hopefully this will continue with the new thread. Again, thanks for all the interest and feed back, it is very much appreciated.

Cliff Lasater
Riverside, CA

 

Best of luck - this was a great thread, and one heck of a project.

I'll close it for now - if you need it reopened later, send a pm to one of the moderators and we'll reopen it for you. :)