POWERPLANT

After about a year of searching, I came acrossed this blue beauity.  It is a 1987 Subaru GL sporting a EA-82 SPFI engine. The general engine specification is 1781 cc/108.68 cu.in. It produces 90 H.P. @ 5600 R.P.M. The car was purchased from a police auction for about $80.00. The gentelemen that bought the Soob wanted to use it as a cheap form of transportation, unfortnately, the fellow failed to read the fine print that he received from the auction that reads in very bold print "SOLD AS SALAVGE ONLY!" As it turned out his bad luck was my good fortune. The fellow wanted $200.00 for the heap without a title. After a few moments of negotiating, I was able to obtain the vehicle for a $100.00 bucks. Now the old car has a few miles on her, 140,000 or so, but it runs great!  After completing my hover project, I plan on rebuilding the engine to be on the safe side!

Here we have the thrust engine cradle in fabrication. I guess to date this thing has been the biggest problem. The engine cradle blueprint was drawn for a inline 4 cly engine. The Soob engine is commonly known as a "pancake engine" or a horizontally opposed (flat) engine. Major modification to the cradle will have to happen in order to fit the Soob engine, or completely refab the cradle without blueprints. After chatting with UH about this subject, it was agreed that I could still use the design with some modification. After stripped the old blue bomb, I was able to trade the car body at the local scrap yard  for all the new steel that I needed for the engine cradle. After all said and done the car cost me about $60.00!

After a lot of thought and head scratching, I decided to scrap the frist engine cradle and fabricate a new one.  After a couple of conversations with Billy Zang at UH, I purchased the thrust engine cradle plans for the UH-18, which  recommends using the Subaru powerplant.  It was well worth it,  the plans set was about $10.00 U.S, the cradle is much lighter than the UH-19 engine cradle and requires less welding. A tip that I got from a old time hovercrafter, was to attach the engine support frames to the engine , then weld the cross members. This will keep the engine support frames from twisting out of alignment when welding the cross members. Thanks Carl Gorsuch for the tip! There are some mods needed when fitting the UH-18 thrust engine to a 19P.  The legs of the cradle need to be a few inches wider. This will throw off a few other measuments for the  aft lower bearing suport, but nothing critical. The images above show just about all the drive  hardware in place. I need to purchase the Ever-Flex coupling that attaches to the engine flywheel. My hat is off to all the professional welders out there!  Some grinding and re-welding will have to take place on this project! :)

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