DONE!
Please see this You Tube Video
https://youtu.be/_mOaJHslO94
This project started about 3 years ago when Bob Martin from Kentucky and I started thinking about putting a Fiat 500 engine into an X1/9. Shortly afterward the the 500 Abarth was released.
In the fall of 2013 I started looking for an engine, transmission and wiring from a wrecked Abarth car. I posted a want add in the for sale wanted form and Matt Brannon replied, he had Mike Soter's written off car.
I purchased the engine and everything I thought I would need to do transplant from Matt. On November the 6th Bob Martin drove up from Kentucky and met me at Midwest Bayless location where we stripped out the car and loaded all of the parts into my truck and I headed for Canada the next day.
It wasn't until January of 2014 that I had time to start to work on this project that Matt had started. There are a lot of things to consider when doing a swap and the decision made early on affects the out come greatly. I was always going in several directions at one time.
The start of the project was to install the engine in a section of an X1/9 engine bay to work out interference issues and to get the engine running. This took a year of my spare time. At that point the car that the engine would be installed in would be brought into the shop and it would be only a matter of using the transfer jigs to install the hard points in the 87X. In my mind I thought that this could be done in about 6 weeks. Wrong. Although the test body had resolved several problems, it lacked brake lines, Air Conditioner lines, wiring harness and shifter cables. These all took months to resolve.
By the end of April I asked Bob Martin if he would come up to Canada and spend a week or so to help me get the car together. He agreed and spent 9 nights at my house, we worked long days and had some real head scratchers to over come.
The video shows the car now as it sits road worthy. Some description of the Abarth X1/9 and some in progress video as Bob and I worked on the car.
My sincere thanks to Bob Martin for his help and being a buddy. There were times I was not the best company and the easiest person to work with, he is truly a person to help me obtain my goal of completing this project.
I would also like to thank Bob Brown for his direction on the instrument cluster modifications to get a working Speedometer and Tach and Tony Natoli for letting me bounce ideas off of his head for comment.
I thank all for keeping this project silent as the flood of ideas from many directions would have only kept me busy answering emails and going in directions that could have produced frustration.
So lastly all mechanical issues are resolved, the car has working Air Conditioning. I have a working platform that now can have the ECU tuned like the 500 Abarth's to allow flexibility in a little car that now has the performance that it deserves.
I will be at Freak Out with this car in Pittsburgh.
TonyK.
Grimsby Ontario Canada