After owning the Coupe4 for a while and wanting a little more 'seat of your pants feeling' but not being able to bring myself to modify the rare Coupe4. I decided to build one.
After pricing up a body kit at more than $10k and the same to fit it, the plans where shelved. Was really concerned that without the body kit the front wheels would stick out past the stock guards.
Decided to drop the idea and just bought a CV8 to drive to the WA Monaro Nats last year, but made sure I got an '03 version with the AWD floor pan... just in case you know.
Then a few months ago trawling the net I found a fella with a flare for these kinds of conversions. He is retired and just tinkers with his own supercharged 6L AWD VZ tonner. Asked him one day if he would be interested in converting my Monaro to AWD. Wouldnt you know it, he said he would be keen. So with the approval from the minister of finance, it was game on. Still very uneasy about the front wheel track, but he was confident that it wasnt anything to be too concerned about.
A low K rear ended VZ LX8 Adventra was sourced at the auction and it was all happening.
The engine and trans were dropped from both the Monaro and Adventra. This was our first 'got ya'. The 2WD and AWD tunnels are totally different. The 2WD has a trans mount welded over the top of the Transfer case hump in the floor. So we had to unpick the 2WD cross member mounts and the AWD one from the Addy and weld it into the Monaro floor. This was only required on one side, so was all done in an afternoon.
Bit hard to see with the black paint. But it all looks factory.
From there it was just a simple matter of bolting it all back together. It was a VY Monaro and VZ Adventra. So we decided to VZ the engine bay and use as much stuff as possible off the Adventra. There were a few more 'got ya's' doing this as the engine fans are all wired differently and as we were still using all the VY wiring it needed a bit of a mix n match to get them to work.
Adventra diff was hauled out and recond'd, also fitted an LSD at the same time. As we were using the Monaro wiring we took away the silly cross trac system which is not needed on a road car anyway. This made the conversion so much simpler. But if we did not put the LSD in the diff it would have just been driving one rear wheel and one front. So this way we are always driving atleast 3 wheels.
But this conversion would have been pretty much impossible without having a donor car side by side to rob bits off. There is just so many bits that are AWD only that would break the bank if you had to rush off to the wrecker to buy them every time you found out you needed something. Plus then you have the left overs from the wreck that you can sell off to get some of the conversion costs back.
All in all it went very smoothly indeed. Had to mate up the orginal Adventra exhaust headers to my 2 1/2 inch Monaro exhaust, and had to remove my Harrops as they would not suit the AWD. But installed a set of HSV Avalanche brakes that I got off eBay and I swear they are nearly as good as the Harrops.
So this is how it sits now. I am pretty happy, no one can pick any difference with the car unless I tell them. But with the extra 30mm track each side the wheels do stick out further than I would like. So I have the front wheels in getting modified to hopefully take around 10mm of track off.
Next up for the car is either a manual conversion. This fella seems to think that it is just a matter of making up an adapter on his CNC to join the manual box onto the transfer case OR there is an option of converting the 4 speed auto to flappy paddle steering wheel controls. Now that would be a neat trick, so not sure which way to go with that one. But once that is all sorted, I hope to supercharge the thing to get that seat of your pants feeling that I dont get on the Coupe4.
Any questions?? just ask.
