View GarageCheers fellas!
Brad, there is so much that has gone wrong in this build, it would be very dishonest to not share at least some of it! Haha
Rob, that is of course true about keeping both ends in mind, but I think I have some idea of what the front end wants (it's now got about as much front spring as I am comfortable with in the front end for a road car, it has always had a fair bit of ARB in it, plus the body control from the dampers is probably now as good as it'll ever get) and the next step is not to say that the suspension in the car is even wrong, rather that I may need to compromise it to make the TrueTrac diff work when I'm throwing the car around. They are a street car diff, not a race car diff, and I'm beyond their limit with what is happening currently.
The fibreglass bonnet has been fighting with the bonnet stops on the rad support panel, and a slight crack had developed in the fibreglass bonnet frame. Been wanting to attend to this for a while:
Turned an old stainless paint scraper blade into some brushed spreader plates to tidy it up and stop it happening again.
Cool.
I also find that when I close the barrel vents in the middle of the car and pump the fan up high to demist the windscreen, it doesn't have much grunt because a lot of the fan's effort is coming out of the footwell vents, where you could roast potatoes. I don't have a mechanism to close off the footwell vents, so I figured I should restrict how much air they can flow and see if that improves things. I cut up some small ABS plastic sandwich panels with some smaller holes to restrict the flow and hopefully put a bit more into the demist area. I haven't tested this yet and it may take some tuning, but it's very easy to open up and modify again if it's not right.
And I had the dash out to check & fix a few little things. The barrel vents in the sides of the dash were a little "loose" (not keeping their position at highway speeds when the airflow is a lot stronger), I cut some thin plastic washers out of an aerosol can dust cover and used them as shims to increase the pre-load on the pivot point when I clipped them back in. They are nice and tight now.
I've also had the shits how I've put the "Check Engine" light into the lower dash, and it has always looked pretty out of place, with everything else in a round hole of the fascia being a black knob with a chrome surround.
Whilst it's not practical to build a knob and put the light inside it, and it's even hard to put a chrome bezel around it, I at least put it in the lathe and took a little cut off the black anodised aluminium so it's raw ally, and polished it up a bit.
Not perfect, but a little bit closer to matching the design language.
The car is going into MotorEX Street Elite class this weekend, which is once again another huge milestone for me and the car. There were a few jobs that had to be completed before this could happen.
I've been putting off the rear spoiler for like a year and a half. I got it fitting sweet in primer, it stayed with the painter during lockdown, and somehow when I got it back, it had opened up and didn't fit acceptably. It would not touch on the leading edge and the lock barrel area without a huge amount of force. I have since ground a lot more of the inside out to weaken it and have recently been clamping it up in various ways using plastic strapping and F-clamps in different spots (off the car) to distort it so that it would glue on without too much tension. The other day I managed to do a dry-fit that looked acceptable:
So I took the plunge. Sanded the hatch lid:
And these sections on the quarters:
Spooge:
And painstakingly, after lots of clamping, swearing, applying and cleaning adhesives in different areas, it looks pretty good:
Sanded out the worst paint defects in the most visible area and hand polished that area to prepare for the graphics:
Also, while on display at Summernats I found it a bit tricky as I wanted to leave the door a bit ajar to help people look inside the car, but it was just moving around and at risk of hitting the posts around the car, for MotorEX I wanted this a bit more sorted.
I grabbed a stainless washer, cut off a small piece of stainless tube, and found old stainless steel drawer handle and belted the shit out of one of the bent ends until it was straight:
Welded that sucker together:
And vuola, this will hold the door in a nice fixed part-open position and look tidy:
