The prop shaft centre bearing is mounted on a substantial angle iron frame. This may be strong but it takes up an awful lot of space and the angle iron is likely to get hooked up on rocks.
 

Here you can see how far the prop sticks down below the floor line
 

The floor in the Torino is flat. There is plenty of room for a tunnel as the seats need to be raised up about 100mm off the floor anyway.

  Stage 1: Cut off all of the angle iron then chop out the floor so we can see where everything will sit. A plasma cutter is a fantastic tool for this job! The prop cannot sit right up inside the tunnel because the joint angles will end up too great resulting in vibration and possible failure. As you can see the exhaust is now the lowest point. This isn't good but there isn't much I can do about it.
 

 This is pretty much the same view as above. As you can see the prop is a lot higher. 
 

 Here is the made up tunnel. It is folded up out of 1mm Zintec coated mild steel. The join where it meets the small tunnel in the front is a bit untidy but this is an off-roader and you won't see it under the mud :-).
 

The next day, after thinking about the exhaust problem I came to the obvious conclusion: Run it down the tunnel as well! Unfortunately there isn't enough roon in this tunnel so it looks like time for tunnel MK2. Sorry about the slighty odd camera angles!. This one is made of 1mm galvanised (I ran out of Zintec). It is deeper and wider. In these pics the rear section is welded in and the handbrake, gearchange and 4x4 lever are all in place. Once the tunnel is fully welded in it will be stronger than the original frame and much lighter.
 

 Here are the gearchange and 4x4 linkages. The original 4x4 mechanism uses a pivoting right angled lever arrangement so the 4x4 handle moves up and down. With my tunnel arrangement this mechanism won't fit. Instead I use a simple lever with a pivot in the middle so the lever now moves forward and back. It has quite a short travel but the movement is nice and positive. The rather rusty looking bar is the extended pushrod. As you can see it has to wrap around the gearchange linkages.
 

 After all that work you can see there is a nice space for the exhaust to fit down. To keep heat under control the exhaust will be wrapped with heat insulating tape. I intend to change the exisitng 1l engine to a fuel injected 1.2l Fiat Punto engine. This engine has a lot more torque at low revs which is very useful off road. Unfortunately cars fitted with this engine have a catalyst. For SVA, if the engine was originally fitted with a cat then it must have one. As I have no room for the cat this is a problem. To get around the problem the current engine will be used to pass the SVA then I will change it at a later date.

Now the prop shaft has been moved, all of the joint angles are wrong. To fix this both the engine and back axle will have to be relocated. Here is the page that deals with the problem. 

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