Ben280

This is the most activity this thread has seen in years, ANOTHER WEEKEND UPDATE! Got the intake welded up, some gasketing on the radiator extractor, and got the car back on the ground. Also got a nut and bolt done on the car. I still need to bleed the brakes, and do a quick fluid check and I'll be in good shape for a few events!

If this car only inspired, I'd feel pretty good about it. As it sits, planning to go up to Packwood WA for an auto-x event in late June. Basically, doing what I should have done in 2023 and actually shaken the car out before driving it on a race track! From there, I'm hoping to get back to The Ridge in July with OnGrid for an HPDE day, and then up to Area27 in BC for a couple days with a buddy. That's going to be a great event, so I'm pretty stoked on that one. Got material coming tomorrow, should be a good weekend of welding!

Good progress over the long weekend. Paint, bondo and fiberglass is mostly a waiting game which is pretty annoying. Got the duct glued together and painted so it looks like something. Trimmed it up a little and we are in great shape! The holes in the hood are a little bit large, but that's ok, and will likely get solved with a new hood (fiberglass) or something on top. Also got the transition piece painted which is exciting! This will help blend the splitter into the air dam, and will get taped onto the splitter once I put some trim on top of it. Need to get to work on the new intake pipe as well, going to put the filter over near the wheel for now. In the future, I'll flip the manifold and pull air from the cowl/wiper box area, but that's a bigger lift in terms of fabrication. Can't tell you how excited I am to have a metal fabrication project after 10 months of composites.

Small fiberglass update. I got the general shape made, and it's ready for trimming and bonding together. I'd like to test fit it on the car, and make sure the radiator is picking up in the right spot. Excited for this, we've got fully ducted air going into and coming out of the radiator now!

I for one, appreciate that the one active thread on this website is a handful of folks coming to defend Derek, and somebody with an ax to grind.

FWIW, when I spoke with Bluemoon Performance (importers in SoCal for the PAMS head) in 2022 they quoted $8-10k for the head with no cam towers or other parts. Do with that what you will, I would expect the PAMS twin cam head to decently expensive.

Also working on getting the radiator extractor wrapped up. This part has been a LONG time coming, and after a lot of pausing since I wanted to do it with carbon fiber, I've cheaped out and will just make it out of fiberglass and waft black paint towards it. This was a pretty fun thing to build, and figure I can get y'all up to speed! First tho, everybody in the way-back machine to March 2024. First thing to do was figure out how to make the shape. I started by cutting two huge holes in the hood, and start taping cardboard and paper to connect the three shapes. The challenge with this method is that I've firmly attached the hood to the car with tape, and because the shape is mostly paper, there was no good way to remove it to do anything with it! I decided here that expanding foam was going to be necessary to keep the shape and give me something to work with. I managed to squeeze a trash bag around the radiator, and bought some 2 part expanding foam from Amazon and started pouring. This process took SOOO MUCH FOAM! So much foam. I had to re-order 3 times to fill the shape out. Two things to note for folks thinking about doing this: This foam expands quite a bit requiring a pretty rigid form, and it gets HOT. The foam expands as part of an exothermic reaction, and will get up to about 180*. This gets worse if you pour a lot of foam on top of other foam, so you really want to let it cure and do it's thing before you layer it up. Once the thing was full, I trimmed the outlet and then took the hood off and realized the Big Chungus (tm) that I had created. Realized here that I forgot we need to make space for the air filter. Also, realizing that all the cardboard and other crap I used to make the shape is now glued forever to the foam. The drivers side channel is also quite a bit bigger than the passenger side, as the passenger side dodges a number of cooling tubes. Some shaping is clearly needed. Luckily because this is 2 part foam (never NEVER use Great Stuff foam for this), it was easily shaped with saws, grinders and other tools, was sandable and fillable with bondo. Ended up with a good shape! Last thing to do was fill in the area where the radiator sat so the fiberglass has a mounting flange. I then wrapped the whole thing in metal tape to promote reasonable release and it promptly sat in the shop for a year. I started fiberglassing it up this week, and have the bottom of the shape glassed in. My plan is to use plastic and more metal tape to create this piece in 2 parts, rather than trying to break, dissolve and generally remove the foam by disastrous methods. It's looking pretty alright, hoping to get the rest of it glassed up today!

Got into the fiberglass over the weekend to start popping out the last few parts I need to get this thing "finished". First up is the 3d printed splitter transition piece. I think in a modern car this would be a lip, or airdam, but we all know the area it's filling! I knew I didn't want to encapsulate the PLA core, since this is just a wind diverter, so I taped down a bunch of plastic sign board to the bench, and then used hot-glue and foil tape to attach the piece to the boards. Polyester resin doesn't like to attach to foil tape, or corrugated plastic sign board, so I was pretty sure I could pop this piece off when I was done. A little bit of fiberglassing later, and we had the piece ready to go! Side note; People who are able to take in progress photos of fiberglassing are wild, and have a huge budget for gloves. Once the glass cured (which took a long time, I'm using a resin that i'm not super used to, under catalyzed to extend the working time), I was able to mark my trim lines, and then pop the part off! Super satisfying de-molding the part like that. For a Positive to Positive process, I couldn't be happier. I do think I'd like to try printing a mold, rather than a buck like this, it might make the finishing process just a little nicer. Needs to be sanded, some filling bondo applied and then primer and paint. This piece will then get a little rubber lip along the top, and likely be "speed taped" to the splitter. The front of the car is already low, if this were attached forever, I'd be in trouble!

My inability to get involved with FB groups has lead me to instagram for a long time, but I think I'm heading back here for a bit. Generally better discourse and certainly better information. In line with the thread, I really wish I was #23! When I blew up my Rebello back in 2022 and made the call to go LS, a small part of my brain wishes I had done more math to see what the LS would actually cost to swap in, vs Dereks head. I think it would have been pretty close at the end of the day, and a whole heap of fun. Thanks for doing what you did, do, and continue to do @Derek!!

No idea on the owner but wow! I would have grabbed that hatch for the history in it alone. Rare to see these in a junkyard these days as well, very cool.

Thanks!! It's been a bit, refinding the stoke has been a challenge, but I'm getting excited again. Life changes (wife going back to school) means the race budget is way reduced this year, but I got my eye on a couple days.

315/30r18 rear and 295/30r18 front. I think the rear wing is 72" wide with a 13" chord length. I wanted the wing to match the rear track width which is quite a bit wider than factory. Got the airdam painted and mounted this weekend, and finalized the splitter wire mounting positions. I have to fiberglass up the blending piece, but that should be pretty speedy once I get material. A couple photos of the mounting/airdam fixed on: I have a radiator to hood duct/extractor that i'll throw glass up while I'm at it in the next few days.

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!

The Megasquirt wasn't wrong. It was working well enough, but it wasn't able to provide any higher level diagnostic functions, effectively run the IAC valve, run drive by wire, or integrate a comprehensive traction control strategy. My tuner was also moving away from tuning megasquirt, and as someone who relies on a tuner, I figured giving him want he needed to succeed was important. The Megasquirt is a powerful computer than can do a lot, but I was running into those limits. The Haltech also provides a lot more I/O functionality, which I was out of on the Megasquirt.

Hijack away Cary! I like the Howe Racing as i knew it would work with the balljoint I wanted to use, and it had the correct thread for an inboard heim joint. I had to modify it enough at this point, I think next time I'll have some fully custom ones bent up, and use a spherical bearing on the inboard side.