lightweight buggy

That MGF buggy looks great for hooning around in fields. It's difficult getting decent clearance and travel out of transverse engine setups. Some early VW buses used reduction hubs. I have some hub bits and keep looking at them, trying to think of a way of adapting them to use modern drive shafts and CVs. 4" lift portals!

The engine conversion in your Chinese buggy looks pretty tidy. Even better it's road legal.

I have to admit I really like air suspension. With decent shocks it just floats over bumps. I keep looking under my Jimny trying to figure out a way of fitting air bags to it. I wouldn't recommend going for a coaxial bag/shock setup like I did on the Copelander and the trials car. In my case it was the only way I could package them but it's a lot more engineering and prone to leaks.
I recently worked on an air conversion on a Fourtrak using Discovery air bags. We basically cut off the rear half of the chassis and made a new one, moving the back axle 16" further back. This is a heavy towing rig and we wanted the towbar as close to the axle as possible for stability.
I wouldn't mind trying some Fox air shocks sometime. They are rather expensive though. They also have a lot of seal friction so they don't react well to slowly changing loads.

more progress, chassis is finished  and ready for paint,  i  welded up the stiffeners inside the chassis first, then closed up the opening and ground it down then made some stiffeners to weld on the out side just to make sure

i used 5mm plate which  i think is overkill but it makes the side of the stiffening plate in the same plane as the radius arm brackets so that then makes it easy to drop a bracket down to beef up the radius arm mount   which i seem to remember folded over very easily on my first jimny when you started to get serious off road

something like that but with a bigger drop plate, maybe 2 or 3 holes so i can move the radius arm fixing bolt forward when i go to longer springs

 

axles have gone to the shotblasters   and i found another set of alloys under the bench so they went too

 

well the metro engine might not be usable after all,   i took the air cleaner off to fine mice living in there 

the throttle body is full of crap and jammed,   i might see if i can find an su  carb  and inlet manifold for it

failing that i will go straight to an mgf engine and box  
 

Well that sucks. Might be worth pulling the inlet manifold to see if mouse pee has managed to get into the engine.
Just a thought with CVT - they use an automatic clutch to take up drive. If you do a lot of low speed manoeuvring off road you could overheat it.

ive dropped off both manifolds   engine looks ok  on the inlet side,  early  rover 100's had an Su carb , will try and find one along with the manifold,  its a nice small light engine, would like to use it if i can   if not plenty of others out there

i think the transmission will hold up, keen to experiment with it