Lightly Crashed Superformance...
 

So the wife and i were pulling off into what looked like a parking lot adjacent to a road through our local shutdown military base, when WHAM! felt the car drop nose down and land engine racing...Shutdown and got out to survey what was surely the entire front end crunched. Looked perfect? Tried starting it up, right to about 3k RPM, shut it down. Then the wife points out the shifter box up through the shifter hole and the ring all separated.

Looked around the motor and realized that the reason it was racing is that it had shifted and the throttle linkage was opening the carb.

Having no metric tools to readjust the linkage we limped it home 5 miles by shutting the engine off (not good from 3000 rpm) or dragging the brakes.

Final toll mechanically is pretty much just ruined olthoff motor mounts, cobra valley trans mount, and bent center removable trans mount. On inspection the lower bell housing caught the curb which was luckily pretty weak (no steel in it), two scuff on the frame and a little on the gas tank, and a shifter boot.

Ordered new mounts and had the bracket straightened. Meanwhile i jacked up the motor and scooched it back (forward about 3/4") to where it should be.

There are two dings where the side pipe hangars hit the body and the passenger side header exit has some stress cracks. The glass under the carpet where the shifter comes out is broken but some clamps and poly resin will fix that. The body work will just have to wait and probably hide under some strategically placed silver adhesive tape...

Really amazing how all the rubbery and removable bits prevented major damage...

Should be back on the road by this weekend for another crab run! Watch those parking lots!

Steve H
1764

So sorry to hear that.
Hopefully it will all go back together better than new.

Ouch... Sorry to hear about your car. Glad you guys are safe.

I am glad that there was no more damage than that and that both of you are OK. What did you drop off into?A ditch or bank that you never saw?

Ron

My post is purely out of curiosity. The OP's description is too vague to visualize what actually happened. Intentionally? Did you hit the bottom of the engine on something hard enough to push it up and break the motor mounts? Did you then decide to drive the car home in that condition? Did you consider having it towed home so you could do a thorough evaluation of the damage before driving it? .... You didn't have to share this incident with us at all, but you did. So you must have expected some questions.

It sounds like he drove over what he thought was an entrance with a curb cut but instead went over the curb. Usually about a 4" drop which would certainly bottom out a Cobra just past the engine. If he'd been going faster he might have scooted across it :)

Stated quite clearly in the original post - the bottom of the bell housing hit the curb as he drove into what he thought was a normal entrance into an empty lot.

To answer/clarify we drove over a 6 or so inch drop at maybe 10mph, the front end dropped, the frame hit just fwd of the bell housing and the bell housing took off about 2 inches of unreinforced concrete. Sun was in our eyes, and the curb was only painted on the far side. I went back and looked and at one tome there had been a fence...

As for driving it home I could pretty much tell what damage had been done, plus we were on a big empty ex navy base where I could feel the car out. Only a few miles with no highway so we drove it home.

Thanks for the clarification. My curiosity is happy now. I hope its like new soon.

Mmm, sounds totaled. I'll give ya $500 for it. :cool:

Its actually better than before, took my time aligning everything with new trans and motor mounts (Olhoff and Cobra valley)...Side pipes more centered, drive shaft angles better, and better bolts and shims used on the motor mounts. I have a nasty little scratch by the drivers side side pipe bracket, but have been building it up slowly with touch up paint. For this project i bought two more jack stands and worked on the car completely elevated instead of crawling under a wedge like usual...

I re glassed the shifter surround and attached the ring with speed nut clippy things: Stiffer and more secure than ever.

Nice little project, the cause was a bit traumatic, but were all happy again!

Steve H
1764

The low point on my car is the bellhousing which I suspect is very common if not nearly universal. I've had it make light contact with parking lot speed bumps a couple of times and that's enough so that I now avoid them whenever possible. If I can't do that I take them VERY slowly and/or on an angle.

Oltoff Motor Mount Deflection
 

I think these took the impact saving the rest of the car from structural damage...Put a new pair in.

Mine is the lowest point also. It is a QuickTime, so it has a very narrow flange. I worry about hitting it on speed bumps and am extremely careful.

Tortuga- Are you confident the there are no cracks in the back of your block where the bell housing bolts on?

Wow, those look like they did their job!

As a caveat, I put a lot more spacers between the top of the mount and the trans in order to line up the shaft and get the motor level: washers seem to defeat the purpose of the stout mount. I stole one of our thin Teflon cutting boards and cut out rectangles with the same footprint as the mount, used two of these and a thin sheet of aluminum to achieve about a 5/8 lift. This also required 2" 1/2" grade 8 flanged bolts to run all the way up and through the threaded ears on my tko 600 trans...all stiffer than a honeymoon hardon now...

What driveshaft angles are correct for an SPF?

I don’t believe there are any prescribed correct angles for a Superformance driveshaft installation, rather general guidelines for a correct installation. Just search the web. Lots of great info available. The MKIII driveshaft is quite short, but the same rules apply.
Blas

I tried for about equal and opposite angles in both vertical and horizontal planes...

The Latest...
 

Well all is not well with the wild child, went for ice cream with the wife last Sunday. Started the car to leave and it made some weird mechanical rattles, uh oh...locked in neutral. Had to get it moved so got her into first and limped to a gas station:lots of bad noises from the box (TKO 600). Flat bed home, seems like the whack the box took knocked something bad out of whack...

New box is $2500, think the thing got knocked out of allignment which is apparently VERY critical and not automatic even though everything plugs in. It has had a bit of a bearing whine after the incident that I guess I should have investigated...crap

Off to taoromina's, I could r&r the thing myself but not all that confidant about the whole allignment thing.