Tweet
Where to start. It has been ages since I put together some real content... here's the last 6 months in a snap shot.
Last year semester ended just as house renovations began. My old man got himself a massive Harley and with it needed somewhere to park the thing. We have long had a grotty storage area accessible from the garage that we decided to open up the doorway to and partially concrete. This meant clearing out the dirt floored space and storing all our junk either in the garage or in land fill. As such the car was temporarily buried in said junk unfortunately, as well as my work space. When I got all the shit out of the area it dawned on me how big it was - previous piles of stuff went floor to ceiling with a single pathway through, hiding how big the area really was. I decided to build a proper workshop under there which took up more or less my whole summer. I previously had a workbench at the back of the single garage approximately a foot from the Z which was less than ideal to say the least. Over the course of 2-3 months I built loads of shelving, flattened out and covered the floor, wall mounted loads of cabinets and hooks to open up floor space and knocked up an epic wrap-around workbench that is finished with a stainless top and likely stronger than the whole house. A few more lights got put in as well as power points and extractor fans and a fridge for good measure.
Along with the space upgrade I have also picked up some heaps better tooling - I freighted in a 20 CFM air compressor, picked up a linisher, gathered a whole array of air tools (oh my god yes) and most recently a big fuck off 1.5 HP band saw to run sheet metal through. Can get some pics of the set up if anyone is interested. At the same time as this I also got a new part time job at Hypertune, which I am stoked on. The production standards on the after market parts there are second to none and the array of CNC machines is epic, and they're good people to work with.
So this all meant I had SFA time to actually work on the car, not that I would change any of it. Here's what I have managed to piece together over fist semester this year (and a bit of late last year).
The last thing I was working on before the renovations was the front tubs. They are more or less polished off now, at long last... lots of things I would have done differently now that they're done.
The tubs started life as an after market rear fender for a chopper before getting bisected.
As much as possible material was welded on to them before they were tacked into the car (first mistake; your car is a jig, use it)
It wasn't until the job was well underway that I realised it was entirely possible the radius of the fender curve could have been entirely different to the radius of the OEM inner fender. Luckily this was not an issue.
Unfortunately all that bench welding did put a bow in one of the fenders, which was awkwardly straightened out in-situ:
The rest of the spaces were then patched with as few patch panels as possible, with the exception of this little piece that was back welded, ground down topside and used to mate the very top corner of the strut tower to the tubs:
Then, through the magic of the internet (and fucking weeks of grinding, drilling spot welds, welding, grinding and grinding):
They still need a good going over and a final prime, but the bulk of the work is done on the tubs. Next up for the bay is fixing the front upper control arm mounts; a job I am well into as I write this.
It was about this time that I got my new part time job decided to play with some manifolds since that is a lot of what we do. I have had my custom set of single turbo manifolds for some time now and they have always needed some work. This started with someone local putting up for sale a Tial 44mm gate including both v-bands and weld-on flanges for just 50 bucks with a known/unknown problem. Aware that Tial components are available separately I picked it up and exploded it;
Found a leaky diaphragm (common problem from internal screws coming loose),
and voila, gun 'gate for less than $150.
Then I got the exhaust manifolds back from ceramic coating and everything looked beautiful.
This lasted up until I realised the manifolds didn't have the right flange.
Twice.
I'm going to stick a Borg Warner on this thing, and that means a T4 rather than the lame T3 flange. I sorted out a billet replacement through work, milled it down some (15mm is way too thick/heavy) then took it home and put a nice edge on the divider. Even though my manifolds aren't divided, I'm fitting up a quick spool valve to a twin scroll exhaust housing so a knife-edged divided flange was still the way to go.
This took a little more adjustment than the wastegate flange which did wonders for the condition of the coating.
Then some more zip-zap-zoopity-zop from my colleague;
Beautiful. Not so much so for the ceramic coating now, but after a quick rattle can touch up that didn't really matter (runners are all still well coated and that's where it counts).
Merges are hard:
Ran out of material about 6 times and had to import some decent cable ties (ridiculous) but got there in the end. Pre-turbo merge was the only real point I was more or less at a loss at how to cover, but close enough is good enough.
That's all for tonight, I've got loads more photos that I'll write up in the next couple of days. I'm currently in China on scholarship for a few weeks which gives me a bit of time to do this stuff (it's been pretty damn hectic on my end as of late). The best part of being sent to China is that I've booked a good 8 day layover at Japan on the way back and you can bet I've made mad plans for that.
- A
Last year semester ended just as house renovations began. My old man got himself a massive Harley and with it needed somewhere to park the thing. We have long had a grotty storage area accessible from the garage that we decided to open up the doorway to and partially concrete. This meant clearing out the dirt floored space and storing all our junk either in the garage or in land fill. As such the car was temporarily buried in said junk unfortunately, as well as my work space. When I got all the shit out of the area it dawned on me how big it was - previous piles of stuff went floor to ceiling with a single pathway through, hiding how big the area really was. I decided to build a proper workshop under there which took up more or less my whole summer. I previously had a workbench at the back of the single garage approximately a foot from the Z which was less than ideal to say the least. Over the course of 2-3 months I built loads of shelving, flattened out and covered the floor, wall mounted loads of cabinets and hooks to open up floor space and knocked up an epic wrap-around workbench that is finished with a stainless top and likely stronger than the whole house. A few more lights got put in as well as power points and extractor fans and a fridge for good measure.
Along with the space upgrade I have also picked up some heaps better tooling - I freighted in a 20 CFM air compressor, picked up a linisher, gathered a whole array of air tools (oh my god yes) and most recently a big fuck off 1.5 HP band saw to run sheet metal through. Can get some pics of the set up if anyone is interested. At the same time as this I also got a new part time job at Hypertune, which I am stoked on. The production standards on the after market parts there are second to none and the array of CNC machines is epic, and they're good people to work with.
So this all meant I had SFA time to actually work on the car, not that I would change any of it. Here's what I have managed to piece together over fist semester this year (and a bit of late last year).
The last thing I was working on before the renovations was the front tubs. They are more or less polished off now, at long last... lots of things I would have done differently now that they're done.
The tubs started life as an after market rear fender for a chopper before getting bisected.
As much as possible material was welded on to them before they were tacked into the car (first mistake; your car is a jig, use it)
It wasn't until the job was well underway that I realised it was entirely possible the radius of the fender curve could have been entirely different to the radius of the OEM inner fender. Luckily this was not an issue.
Unfortunately all that bench welding did put a bow in one of the fenders, which was awkwardly straightened out in-situ:
The rest of the spaces were then patched with as few patch panels as possible, with the exception of this little piece that was back welded, ground down topside and used to mate the very top corner of the strut tower to the tubs:
Then, through the magic of the internet (and fucking weeks of grinding, drilling spot welds, welding, grinding and grinding):
They still need a good going over and a final prime, but the bulk of the work is done on the tubs. Next up for the bay is fixing the front upper control arm mounts; a job I am well into as I write this.
It was about this time that I got my new part time job decided to play with some manifolds since that is a lot of what we do. I have had my custom set of single turbo manifolds for some time now and they have always needed some work. This started with someone local putting up for sale a Tial 44mm gate including both v-bands and weld-on flanges for just 50 bucks with a known/unknown problem. Aware that Tial components are available separately I picked it up and exploded it;
Found a leaky diaphragm (common problem from internal screws coming loose),
and voila, gun 'gate for less than $150.
Then I got the exhaust manifolds back from ceramic coating and everything looked beautiful.
This lasted up until I realised the manifolds didn't have the right flange.
Twice.
I'm going to stick a Borg Warner on this thing, and that means a T4 rather than the lame T3 flange. I sorted out a billet replacement through work, milled it down some (15mm is way too thick/heavy) then took it home and put a nice edge on the divider. Even though my manifolds aren't divided, I'm fitting up a quick spool valve to a twin scroll exhaust housing so a knife-edged divided flange was still the way to go.
This took a little more adjustment than the wastegate flange which did wonders for the condition of the coating.
Then some more zip-zap-zoopity-zop from my colleague;
Beautiful. Not so much so for the ceramic coating now, but after a quick rattle can touch up that didn't really matter (runners are all still well coated and that's where it counts).
Merges are hard:
Ran out of material about 6 times and had to import some decent cable ties (ridiculous) but got there in the end. Pre-turbo merge was the only real point I was more or less at a loss at how to cover, but close enough is good enough.
That's all for tonight, I've got loads more photos that I'll write up in the next couple of days. I'm currently in China on scholarship for a few weeks which gives me a bit of time to do this stuff (it's been pretty damn hectic on my end as of late). The best part of being sent to China is that I've booked a good 8 day layover at Japan on the way back and you can bet I've made mad plans for that.
- A
Comment