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Wow...she's looking great, Ben! Nice rebuild after that off at GTA a while back.

Thanks. Glad to see someone running something that wide. Car looks fun, good luck at your next event.

The actual ZCD L brackets themselves were not consistently bent. The widest gap I measured was almost 1/4" which I suppose can be filled in with weld, but is absolutely unacceptable for my standards. There's definitely a spectrum of skill and expectations when it comes to metalwork. My buddy had floors and rockers put into his 60s mustang by a mobile welder...sure it had new metal but the fit and welding was terrible. I took the time and massaged the metal to 0 gaps all around on both rails before welding. I shouldn't be surprised at this point tbh, even the door hinge kit from ZCD was garbage. I ended up having custom bushings machined after zinc coating for perfect door actuation. With that said I probably won't learn my lesson and will order more stuff from them to fix in the future 😂.

Well, winter was quiet! Spent most of the winter skiing, rather than being cold in the shop, but spring has sprung and we have some exciting progress on the car. Since the car is in good mechanical shape, the big to-do's have been cosmetic. Mainly the air dam! It's such a cobbled together thing that I knew I had to make some improvements. To that end, I bought a 3d printer, whipped out my iphone and got to designing some new end areas. I'm keeping the same spirit of the airdam as before, but symmetrical sides (just flipped this piece and printed again) meant that I can be confident in the tolerances that I'm working with on both sides of the car! Pretty impressed how well this lined up fresh off the printer, and from a medium quality iphone photogrammetry scan of the front end. I opted to use the PLA as a core for the fiberglass layup, we'll see how that does long term. People have issues with PLA as a finished surface as the "glass transition" temperature is pretty low, and normal temps for sunny car parts will result in significant softening. I think inside 5 layers of fiberglass it should be just fine. (Glassed, sanded down and filler primer. It's easily the nicest part of the airdam at this point!) There is a pretty good gap between the bottom of the air dam and the splitter, so I printed up another whole piece that I will use to pull a direct positive part from. I don't want this to be super heavy duty, so I'm not going to encase the PLA core. (printed and glued) This piece had some scaling issues, even though I modeled it from the same references as the airdam pieces. Oh well! Final bit was that I really needed to make the car all one color again, and install some of the fun stuff I had made up before the winter. I had aspirations of painting the car, but when that plan met with the reality of budget, I opted to go back and vinyl wrap the front end again. The hood might get a re-do, but otherwise I'm rather happy with how it all turned out! Hoping to have the car mostly back together this weekend, and then aiming for an auto-x event at the end of June to shake out the cobwebs from car and driver!