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63 Corvair - Air Cooled Life - Discussion


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4 hours ago, Threeonthetree said:

Corvairs had handling issues during development, mainly due to the swing axle rear suspension among other things. GM's partial solution for this was to specify that the cars ran approximately a ten psi pressure differential front to rear. This alleviated the problem to some extent but often the owners would forget or ignore these instructions (because who puts 20psi in the front and 34psi in the back right?) and it directly led to quite a few crashes. The fallout of which was highlighted in Ralph Nader's 'Unsafe at any speed', especially once GM started really pushing the tyre pressure differential. Needless to say, it soon became apparent that this was a band aid fix to the problem.

Whatever wheels and tyres you run, for your own safety please run approximately 10-16psi higher in the rear tyres than you do in the fronts. Run it with equal tyre pressures all around to compare and you'll see the difference. I've pined these things for years and nearly bought an early first generation '61 3 speed base model a year or two ago.

Oh and a little true story: When the engineering team at Rootes Group in the UK were contemplating a rear engined car (later to become the Hillman Imp), they purchased a brand new Corvair and used it on their test track for evaluation. They rolled the car in moderate cornering (supposedly equal tyre pressures) and some of the occupants were pretty well injured.
They then completely rejected swing axles for their upcoming Hillman Imp and instead fitted an articulated multi link rear setup.

All that aside, I love these things and can't wait to see it in person someday. Good luck and I'm looking forward to the updates.
Oh and the inevitable flung fan belt that these things love to do.

 


 

Hey man, thanks for the info. Will definitely be taking that on board.

Haha yeah the fan belts pretty wild haha. I'll keep a spare at all times

I'll be keeping the the build thread up to date as things happen. Just waiting for parts then it's all on. Watch this space.

Cheers!

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These are a couple cars I've had in the past. There have been others but these are the ones that meant the most...

1982 EX Lancer GSR. This thing was awesome. Factory injected turbo, 4 wheel disc, LSD blah blah blah... Loved this car, still kick myself for selling it. I still seeing it kicking around Hamilton. After it went through a few hands it looks like its found a good owner:P1020589.JPG.ddc283e0413da65be6e2776ae436baac.JPG

And my 85 Cressida. Manual and had a 1g-gte coversion done when I got it but nothing else. I chucked an LSD in it, repainted it, wheels, lowered and gave it a good tidy up. Was a tidy car, I used it as a daily but had to let it go. Kick myself over this one too:
IMG_1851.jpg.8c19097d5a527373599212eebda44ddd.jpg

 

Cheers, Kenny

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Wow. Damn there's some paint skills going on! 

Ive always liked the shape of these. There's a corvoir ute that hooks about Nelson and its so sweet.

Then the other day over coffee I was reading about the hillman imp development and how the designer took 'some' styling cues from the corvoir they'd been testing..... Cripes. Damn near ripped off most of the design features. It's like a corvoir that's been shrunk... Just needs a tiny Porsche engine. 

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1 hour ago, yoeddynz said:

Wow. Damn there's some paint skills going on! 

Ive always liked the shape of these. There's a corvoir ute that hooks about Nelson and its so sweet.

Then the other day over coffee I was reading about the hillman imp development and how the designer took 'some' styling cues from the corvoir they'd been testing..... Cripes. Damn near ripped off most of the design features. It's like a corvoir that's been shrunk... Just needs a tiny Porsche engine. 

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Haha thanks man, a lot of time a patience haha

Yeah the trucks are cool!.

The Imps totally stole the styling of the Corvair. Another car that stole the Corvair stylingf was the Russian made NSU prinz. Look them up

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