So we only had 1/2 a day on the car today. The next big step is to start the roll cage. It technically isn’t a roll cage as the entire car will be a space framed chassis with a lift off body. We have built a rear engines mini pick up to the same principle a few years back. Although it is a lot of work, once you brake the entire build down into individual jobs, it doesn’t seem like too much work to complete it. Here are a couple of pictures of the mini pickup we built, one of them at a steam rally we attended a number of years ago with the shell off the chassis, sat next to it. It gives you a rough idea of the task we have ahead of us.
The obvious difference is that this one if front wheel drive, and front engined. The first stage of building the chassis / roll cage is the rear hoop. This is the main strength of the chassis, and positioning is key. It is important during the build to keep the weight down, and where possible, keep the weight forward to aid with traction. To position the hoop, we need to decide where the seat will be mounted as this hoop is directly behind it. And to do this we need to know where the engine will be positioned, as I need to be sat as far forward as possible, so my feet will only be approximately 75mm from the engine block once the build is finished. So to do this we dropped the shell onto the floor, and skidded the engine roughly into position.
In doing this, we found that the engine is slightly too tall to be positioned exactly where we would had wanted it. So we had to lift the body up onto some batons, whilst keeping the shell level. We always build our cars on a level floor, and then we can use a builders spirit level to check roll cage bars are accurately positioned during the process. Once we jacked the shell up, it gave us about 50mm off gap between the highest point on the engine, and the underside of the bonnet.
That is roughly where we finished the days work. 2 weeks from now we hope to have most of the chassis bars in place, and the turbo mounted. We are fitting a larger turbo on this car, to get it up around 320-340 bhp. The new turbo is off a Mitsubishi Lancer evo 8, and should provide the volume of air needed for the figures that we are after. We’re hoping to have the car out in April / May, and will be offering sponsorship slots on the car in return for steem tokens if anybody is interested. 👍