Howdy,

Rear wheel arches were next.

So I could run the 300mm brakes I decided to use 15" rims.
They are minilites by performance wheels.
15" x 8" with 0 offset.

The wheels were fitted to the suspension and the flares positioned so to clear them at full compression.

The steel guards needed to be cut away to also clear the wheels due to the wide track I'm running.

Welding the patches into the inner guards was quite fiddly because the sheet metal is so thin.

The tricky thing was to work out the position of the sub frame to give me the right ground clearance at mid travel of the suspension
but also fit inside the inner guards.

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  rear sus 6 .jpg (119.43 KB)


  rear arch 1 .jpg (90.88 KB)


  rear arch 2 .jpg (133.98 KB)

Howdy,

The cage was the next step.
I decided to use Walker Chassis.

Because the cage builder is so popular here in South Australia
I had to book the car in 3 months in advance.

When I booked the car in he wanted to know what the car was going to be used for and at what level of racing it was to be used.

I supplied to seat with the car so they could build the cage around it.

The cage also goes into the door cavity on the drivers side to allow enough width for the pedal box.

Drivers side door bars are parallel "nascar" style and level with the side of the seat to make entry / exit easy.

The passenger side bars are a cross to make the entry area larger and the fuel cell more access-able. (fuel cell will be in the passenger seat position)

Once the cage was in I installed the vertical floor panel at the front of the rear suspension mounts
to allow a flat floor panel to go on top of the suspension mounts.

Cheers.
Geoff

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  cage 4 .jpg (143.26 KB)


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  cage 6 .jpg (149.21 KB)


  cage 7 .jpg (130.86 KB)


  cage 8 .jpg (119.13 KB)


  cage paint .jpg (125.50 KB)


  cage paint 1 .jpg (128.56 KB)

Howdy,

The large fabrication stuff on the rear of the shell
is now mostly complete.

I painted the cage with etch primer under coat to prevent it from rusting while I finished off some alterations to the front suspension pick up points.

The tension arms supplied by MADDAT are mounted to the body with a rose joint fitting to stop all unwanted movement to the wheel alignment as the suspension travels.
They also allow for on car adjustments.

The pick up points were modified and strengthened.
The pivot point of the mount is in the same location on the body as the original rubber point so as not to change the geometry of the system.

Cheers,
Geoff.

ps. as there is next to no feed back on this thread can I assume no one is following it?

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I'm following

The rose joint will prevent binding, but the alignment will still change slightly as the wheel raises and lowers, that is inherent to strut suspension. Some say that is desired ...

I'm having a look too.. :)

As am I

Me too. Nice work with that rear suspension.

I'm also following, this is an interesting build. I generally don't comment unless I think it might be useful.

I think we're all interested in this thead and wish we had as much TIME and money to do the same thing.
Keep posting and we'll keep reading
dp

Thanks for letting me know my ravings are be looked at. . . .

Time . . My wife was very understanding when it came to time.
it took 18 months of 3-4 hours most nights after work and 3 weeks annual leave at 12 hours a day to complete.

Money . . . Yes it has cost a bit.
I sold my first 1200 Coupe to Bob the Builder to help fund my Grey import R32 GTR.

The R32 GTR skyline. . . I progressively turned it into a race car with 350 Kw at the wheels. It was very fast but I did not really like the driving style required for a 4WD.

So I sold it and sank all the funds into this 1200 build.

It does help the speed of the build if you can sit down with a wish list at the beginning, and then order a ship load of parts up front.

The only way any of my race car builds were possible is that I did not have to pay for my own time and labour and I was able to do the line share of the work myself. .


Next step was getting the body ready for primer and paint.
I first started sanding the surface rust off but soon realised this was going to take forever and how do you get into the tight corners to remove the sound deadener?

So off to the sand/soda blaster it went. . . .

These pictures are of bare metal.
The sand blasting people said it would start to oxidise and rust almost straight away. . . . .

I sprayed the shell with etch primer the same day once I got it home. . That was a long day. . . .

Cheers,

Geoff

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