Rear Engine Buggy Question

Depends on what direction you mount the motor. If you mount the motor backwards you need a reverse rotation axle in the rear and standard rotation in the front. The crankshaft will only spin 1 direction and have the right firing order in relation to the cam

One cool way to make a light buggy is to transverse mount a front wheel drive car and use the transmission with left/ right stubs as the transfer case, you don’t get a reduction gear, but you can get that back running portals. You’d get the lightest setup with the most ground clearance and still have a good crawl ratio. I’ve only seen a few builds this way but they dominated weerocks comps a few years ago. Jesse Haines builds a lot of em

Honda k24 with manual trans, 6.48 gears in spider 9 axles with 1.83 hummer portals or 74 weld has a crawl ratio of 34.4 which is similar to a lot of ultra 4 guys with t400 3:1 atlas and 5.13 in the axles =36.9

You could also run a divorced case off one of the stubs
 
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Like a Rear Engine buggy....does anything special need to be done to the axles??

Or is it the same no matter how they drive...

In a rear engine buggy drivetrain rotates opposite so the axles need to be flipped or use portals to reverse the rotation.
 
SXOR single seater build

Here’s a link to my build thread for my rear engine buggy. It’s LS powered with a Powerglide and an Atlas. The axles are 9/10” housings flipped upside down.

My rear axle for example. TG fabbed housing with a LP 10” 3rd member flipped upside down.

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The axles do have to be flipped upside down or you’ll be going forward in reverse and vice versa. If you run a 9” axle setup there are options available for the pinion support to help with lubrication of the pinion bearings. They are not cheap though. In the early days there were some guys modifying off the shelf pinion supports to lubevthem better, you can probably still find some of that info on Pirate4x4. Others just overfill with gear oil and go.
 
I built a Honda buggy, 2.3 out of a 2000? Accord mated to a manual 5 speed. FJ-40 axles with IIRC 4.10 gears. It would pull 39's just fine, top speed was probably MAX of 40-50. It was relatively cheap, built by someone (me) that didn't know much about suspension other than what they read on the Internet, but it was fairly competitive in the ECORS class C even though it was the smallest engine and definitely the slowest top speed.
 
I built a Honda buggy, 2.3 out of a 2000? Accord mated to a manual 5 speed. FJ-40 axles with IIRC 4.10 gears. It would pull 39's just fine, top speed was probably MAX of 40-50. It was relatively cheap, built by someone (me) that didn't know much about suspension other than what they read on the Internet, but it was fairly competitive in the ECORS class C even though it was the smallest engine and definitely the slowest top speed.
That thing was awesome!
 
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