To do this modification I obtained a Rover Vitesse rear axle, the reason for this was that the Opel CWP ratios available would not give me the correct gearing, The rover diff had the same splines as the Opel both Salisbury axles, so this meant that special half shafts would not have to be made up. In brief I removed the manta half shaft tubes and took apart the rover axle I then joined the manta half shaft tubes into the Rover Diff housing. After that was completed I then installed a new old stock Salisbury LSD, and sent the axle of to get the backlash set which only cost £25.
In using the rover diff housing I then used the rover torque tube, as the Opel one does not match up to the Rover this meant modifying the Torque tube bracket to accommodate the Rover torque tube
If anyone wants more details on this conversion drop me an email and I will send you the guide. here,s a few pics of the axle and tube in place.
To get the car to this stage it 8 months of hard slog and labour eating up nearly all my free time but thats a normal manta owners story :)
During this time I had emailed Nelson and he had a B series petrol tank going spare so I toyed with the idea of installing the tank in the boot as opposed to the underside of the car, the orgional one when attacked with the sandblaster had developed a few small pinholes in the usual place (upper rear). Needless to say more work was taken onboard to modify the neck of the tank and the air vent to install the tank in the boot. I made up a couple of brackets from 1" stainless steel and then sandblasted the tank and poped it into place .
It now feels like a total restoration to the car with the work that has been done to date one job just seemed to lead to another, so at this point I thought I had better rip out the interior of the car to see if anything needed doing in their before starting on the outside of the car to respray it.
Well I suppose I did'nt really expect anything else but there were a lot of words said that i would not like to repeat here, Apart from the floor at the front, the floor at the rear of the passenger side needed work as well, plus the drivers upper bulkhead, I ended up having to do a spot more welding which meant i had to blow in the paint underneath the car again and buff it up, I guess when I start to do the outside of the car and strip it down I will find something else thats hid away for now. 20/6/04
After a break over the summer I got back to the car in September, quite a lot of my spare time was eaten up with building another garage during the summer to free up space in the workshop, but needs must :)
The first job tackled was to remove the rear seat belt brackets. Between the bracket and the inner arch the water gets in and eats away the inner arch ( see pic below ), the bracket is held on with 4 or 5 spot welds which can be easily seen from the inside. Once removed the bracket and inner arch was cleaned up, A small amount of welding was required on the passenger side arch, this is a common fault on the A series and if neglected will end up in a very large hole :(
With the rusty brackets removed they were then sandblasted, and coated with rust eater and primered, Any repairs needed was done to the arch's where the brackets mated onto, the brackets where then welded back on and around the brackets were sealed with poly sealer, the top of the brackets were left unsealed until the other sealer had hardened and then primer was run down the back to remove any air gaps, the top was then sealed and the brackets masked of and sprayed in to match the rest of the arches. The finished job below.
With this out of the road the next job was to get the inside of the car finished which took a right bit of work, welding a few bits and removing any rust so the car could be painted the finished job was a lot better looking than the floor of the car pictured above, Also by this time I had come across a couple of new jacking points for the car so I decided to fit them and match in the paint underneath. The paint looks a different colour in the pictures but it is the same just my bad picture taking :(
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