V8 conversion

[Adrian]

Been a while but the car passed cert about a month ago and is all legal.
Have been driving it to work for a while and is a lot of fun. Not overly powerful but certainly a huge improvement over the original. Haven't really given it a hard time because of the original diff so have put it back on the hoist and pulled the rear subframe out.
Took Donovans advice and went with the Holden diff. Picked up a complete rear end off trade me for $250. Condition unknown but looks ok, time will tell.
So far I have the diff head mounted in the subframe, fairly straight forward.
Took a bit of head scratching to figure out the best way around the axle situation. My solution is to remove the wheel studs from the Holden hubs, weld up all the holes on the flange and machine it so it resembles the Mazda hub. Once that's done I can redrill the flange to suit the original pcd.
Once they are installed I will make up a spacer to bolt up the rear coupling. Then it's just a matter of shortening the axles and sorting the drive shaft.
All up the rear end, from hub to hub will be 100% Holden.
Will put some pics up if anyone wants a look.

[MX4000]

Good to see some photos. I tried welded axles - half Holden and half RX7 but broke with time. Cheers

[Adrian]

I've yet to cut and weld a set of half shafts out of a independent rear end but I have done quite a few axles out of normal diffs. Haven't had a failure yet and some of those were in big cube heavy cars. Only one way to find out!
Will get some pics up in a couple of days.