[Vwdiesel] Diesel into Karmin Ghea

[William J Toensing]

Why not mount the radiator in the front & use electric fans for cooling. I never owned a KG but I think the grills in front are air ducts. If so, you might be able to duct some of the radiator heat into the cab during winter for heat. Back in the '70s I recall reading in Motor Trend About a 3/4 sized replica made out of fiberglass of the Cord 810. I think it was a Shay replica & it used a Corvair engine & transaxle. To make a front driver out of a rear driver they flipped the differential gear. Or you might be able to turn the KG into a mid engine car. These are just ideas of mine. I have never done any of these modifications nor seen them done. However it interests me when someone does an engine swap of something other than a Chevy V-8 into something else. 
Back in the later "70s or early '80s I knew a fellow by the name of Ed Felt, Long Beach,  who bought a container of British Leyland diesel engines & was installing them in Pintos, Vegas, & mostly into Mazda RX2s & 3s since they were available cheap with blown rotary engines. This was before Mazda got the bugs out of the rotary & had almost ruined the Mazda name in the USA. Ed Felt's genius was in making bellhousing moulds to mate his Leyland diesels to the existing transmissions. He once installed a Leyland diesel into a Porsche 924. Whether he is still around, I don't know. I also heard of a Tony Campana who had a shop in Torrance called Hot Rod City who did a lot of hot rods in the '50s & then did a lot of diesel transplants into motorhomes in the '70s when the first gas crisis hit & prices jumped from .25 cents to $1 a gallon. I was told that Tony Campana once installed a Kubota 3 cylinder 15 HP tractor engine which he turbocharged, into a NSU spyder, NSU's first car with a rotary engine, to see if he could make a car that could get 100 MPG. I heard he was able to get 102 MPG at 50 MPH & its performance was similar to the 25 HP of the late '40s before they became exported to the USA.