I was hoping to one day fabricate my Monte and make RWD instead. I've seen a couple posts related to this but I wanted to know the actual Cons (Pros to obvious lol) in doing so. I found a video of how it would look. Pretty amazing if you ask me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv11PVoiL_c

 

Pretty neat video. I wonder what he's got under the hood (sounds a lot throatier then a v6, that's for sure). I bet it was a LOT of custom work to make it all happen.

 

If you got the money,time and love for Monte I say go for it !!!!

 

It's a Corvette motor (not sure which year) - he used to be a member on here.

 

that's been all over the site, it's just an LS1... on a different chassis I believe, I think the shell was just thrown on..

not really worth all the work IMO

 

I think buying an older C5 would cost a lot less too, meh just an idea..I'm just waiting on a response to see how much it would actually cost.

 

i am still wondering what he used as a frame as in what did he use for the engine trans cradel as well as the rear axel.i think i am going to look into the rear axel of a comaro as well as the flor pan hump i know the fire wall needs to be moded. it is only a dream right now but i need a reliable dd and a comfortable ride. if i wanted anouther rr drive car i would get anouther mustang or the new comaro ss

 

Not to be mean, but a lot of people say that, and it ends up happening maybe 1/1000000 times. To have a shop do it for you would take an extreme amount of money, and is generally out of the question for most people. Very few people are going to put $20k into a $2k car, it just doesn't make much sense. The second issue here- is how much do you trust the shop? Do they have the engineering background and fabrication skills to make you a complete, and safe car in the end?

The only feasible way for a normal person to do it, is to do it themselves (with friends, etc- basically so the labor portion is nearly free, since that is probably 75% of the cost). The downside to this is- to be done properly, this takes a lot of skill- not only engineering and design skill, but also fabrication skill. If either the engineering or actual fabrication (welding, fastening, etc) is done poorly- you could end up dead, and you could end up killing other people (imagine something on the chassis coming apart at or above highway speeds- putting you out of control, and showering parts all over the highway).


From my thoughts- there are a few ways to do this:

-Easiest and best option (and the most expensive) would be to do a full tube chassis. Build a complete rolling tube chassis from the ground up- basically a complete rolling, driving race car- with your choice of engine, trans, suspension, etc- basically something like a NASCAR, or a funny car with a different shell/body. This would take all of the design and engineering out of the equation- a good welding person would be all you would need; you can just buy a tube chassis kit from a major race shop, and then you know that it is designed properly, and will be safe if assembled correctly. Then you just attach your stock sheet metal- weld up some mounts for the fenders, etc- or better yet; to avoid cutting up a perfectly good car for just the outer shell- they do make fiberglass shells shaped like Monte Carlos- just attach one of those.

-Next option is to re-engineer parts of the car only (similar to how some muscle car guys will buy a complete tube chassis front end, or back half). You can buy a pre-engineered back half chassis kit, and you'd only have to engineer a way to mount it to the unibody; and do some rearranging up in your stock front end. The difficulty with this is engineering the interface between the new rear end parts and the stock unibody. You really have to be careful that you're not adding stress to areas that aren't supported enough to handle the loading you're putting on them (either being that you're concentrating the force to a smaller mount point, or that you're applying stress in a direction that it wasn't originally designed to be stressed in).

-The other option I see is to use OEM parts off another unibody car. One way to do this is to separate the floor pan at the factory mount points- modify the floor pan off the vehicle that you're taking from to fit your car, and then re-mount the floor pan to your car. Something similar to this was done by GM with the 5th gen monte carlo and a camaro chassis. This would give you OEM strength, OEM engineering of all of the parts, the only thing you need to be careful of is that it is properly mounted, and that you are careful not to remove strength when you are modifying the new floor pan to fit (because obviously no floor pan from any other body car is ever going to line up perfectly). Obviously you can vary this method to include more than the floor pan as well- and decide to make your cut line higher up, to use more of the donor car's structure- but then you have to decide how you're going to attach it, because now you're dealing with a lot of angles and structural pieces that need to connect.


On top of safety, some other things to consider:
-How are you going to insure it? The cheap way is to not tell insurance. This would keep your premiums the same, but if you get hit- your best case is that they give you the totaled value of your car- $2k or something- and you're out all of the money you spent on it. Worst case is that the insurance adjuster finds out the car has been severely modified and refuses to pay the claim (even worse - you could be sued for every dime you have if someone else gets injured because of a modification that you made that makes the car fail in a non-OEM/non DOT approved way). If you do tell your insurance that you hacked the car up, and put it back together- I'd wonder if they'd even insure you- unless you had some kind of special policy made for kit cars or something.

-How are you going to maintain it? If you have a shop do the swap- and don't know how to work on your own stuff (all the way up to the big jobs, like changing transmissions, etc), you're going to get railed by mechanics to repair the thing. I know multiple people who tried to pull off L67 swaps, or who had a shop do an L67 swap- and either had swap issues or other maintenance problems, and some repair shops wouldn't touch them because of the drastic modification. It just isn't worth the extra liability, and the extra learning curve unless you're throwing extra money at them.


What it basically boils down to- unless you have some kind of massive sentimental attachment to the car, or you already have a ton of money invested- it usually isn't worth it. You can pick up a used 3800 Camaro for under $1000, or you can get an LS1 camaro for under $10k. When you start looking at total cost involved, all of the potential issues, and what the resulting performance is going to be- it always heavily favors just buying a RWD car and being done with it. The only benefit I see to doing a rwd conversion is to have something unique- but that always comes at a VERY steep price.

 

I always wondered how it turned out,and after seeing that video great id say Great!!! wish they were all like that!

 

OK, I think I have seen that member's Monte show up in the upper banner. Nice to know he got it finished!!