Yesterday my wife and I attended an auto auction held by RM Auctions near Toronto.
Among the vehciles was a 1961 Corvair, which had been conveniently left with it engine cover open. I hade never seen a Corvair engine in the metal before, so I studied it for a while. Two questions eventually arose:
1) How do you get the oil filter off?
2) The generator belt appears to double as the cooling fan belt, and traces a rather creative path, flexing and twisting within two planes. Is this primarily why they tended to fail? And if so, why would GM have designed such a critical part do perform such calisthenics?
I remember those. You could also put a Corvair engine in a bug or a Karmann Ghia (which woulda been way cool). IIRC, you had to swap the ring gear to the other side of the pinion because the Corvair engine turned the opposite way of a bug engine. Or use a transporter (bus) transaxle which had gearing at the ends of the axles that reversed the rotation. It was kinda rough on the transaxle and clutch, esp if you used the higher powered engines. I believe the top engine was a 180hp turbocharged unit.
There was also a kit to put a small block V8 in the Corvair. You had to turn the transaxle around and the engine went into where the rear seat (which was pretty useless anyway) normally was. I guess if you did it right, it was a real screamer. Sounds like a real PITA tho...having to put a radiator somewhere, build an enclosure around the engine, etc. But then, if it were easy, it wouldn't be as much fun...
Corvairs were fun to drive if you watched out for the oversteer (or learned how to take advantage of it). They tended to leak oil after a while and often were belt-eaters, tho. The last ones (1965 or so, IIRC) were pretty nice...they did away with the rear swing-axles among other things.
Which was the main subject of my original message, and no-one's answered that question: Why did GM allow such a critical component as the fan belt to flex and twist so much?
Interesting. Except that Porsche and VW cooling fans are mounted vertically.
On reflection I suppose there may heve been issues with rear leg room, which appears to be somewhat scanty in the Corvair compared to other contemporary compacts. If a cooling fan had been mounted vertically, GM would probably have to have installed it on top of the engine instead of behind it, in order to limit the length of the assembly. But then that would have created height problems.
And if GM had driven a horizontal fan off a distributor-type gear drive, that may have presented other difficulties.
It's almost as if the concept was doomed from the start.
The fan belt was a problem but it was your problem.
Also, the rear suspension allowed the wheels to tuck in under certain conditions and the car would roll. Earlier VW bugs had the same problem but fixed it with a sway bar or some such device. GM knew about the earlier VW problem and the VW fix but chose not to spend the trivial amount of money to avoid the problem. All and all, a bad showing on their part.
FWIW, my doubles partner back then was a regional GM service rep.. He once commented that his management was concerned about an anti-trust suit because their U.S. market share was in the 70% range. Last I heard, it was under 25%. Forty years of hubris will do that.
The other option for the 'backward engine roation' problem was to leave the engine in the rear behind the transaxle, use a Kennedy adapter to mount it and get the cam that allowed the engine to rotate in the opposite direction. A buddy of mine has a dune buggy with this setup. Goofy workaround (and a replacement cam is impossible to find these days) but it works. At least when it runs. ;)
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