Truenotch

More from the fibreglass man. I don't need this opening anymore, so might as well block it off:

The new seat sits next slightly further back than the old one, which is great for leg length, but means that the steering wheel is now slightly too far away. I already had a 40mm spacer behind the steering wheel, so figured I needed to find or make something that was around 60mm long. The other issue is that the car is quite hard to get in and out of. Making the steering wheel removable would make life a lot easier. After asking a few people and a quick Google, the NRG quick release came up consistently as a quality option and also happens to be 60mm long. Win! I'm pretty impressed with the design and finish - it helps to justify the price. The cap screws that came with the kit are slightly too long, so I'll need to go bolt shopping tomorrow. Ive also given my bonnet to a friend who does fibreglass. He's moulded the headlight covers into the bonnet and done a couple of repairs to the underside.

Oh man, that video is so great! Love the smoke screen effect and the lack of expression on his face.

I fixed my whole project thread on Friday night. Man it took ages.

Haha, cheers. Those are old cardboard $10 bins that we took to Fieldays with us.

Did some arts and crafts today: Went round to @Rhyscar's place to use his folder and came back with bent versions of the above picture. It fits together as expected and the bumper still fits. Bonus. The radiator gets the full lot of air from the main entry to the airdam and the air filter takes it's air from the grille. Hopefully this forces enough air through the filter to give a proper cold charge. I still need to make the cover and side plate for the filter duct, but it's coming together well. Here's the radiator entry from below. From the radiator's point of view: And the air filter's point of view: Now I need to figure out how join this bit to that bit:

Ticked off a couple of jobs today. Added a couple of dust boots for the top arms on the 4 link. Thanks to @Threeonthetree and others for the suggestion. It flexes well through the normal stroke, but struggles a bit when you disconnect the shocks and let the diff droop to max: I also played around with spacing the bump stops down so they actually do some work. That gives me about 65mm of shock stroke before the bump stop starts touching. From there the bump stop can start adding extra "spring rate" and make for a more predictable ride over big bumps. They squish out quite far at full compression. This was at full articulation (right side right up, left side at max droop). And now there's a tiny amount of clearance for the top arm at full compression.

This wasn't on the list of "must do's", but when Hayden @Miniman76 put this seat up for sale I had to say yes! I've been wanting a seat like this for quite a while. It's super comfy and the seating position is slightly better than the old seat. It sits me a bit more upright and slightly further back, which has straightened my legs out slightly (good thing). The downside is now I'm about 20mm too far back from the steering wheel. Luckily the solution is only a purchase away: This is about 20mm longer than the current boss spacer I'm using and has the added bonus of being a quick release. Not cheap, but it will make it far easier to get in and out of the car. Another job on the list is to make aluminium ducting for the air inlet and radiator. I was originally going to add a divider and make a crude system to direct air into each cavity. I changed my mind and am now using all of the "mouth" of the bumper for the radiator and the gap above pushes air into the filter area. Here's the initial CAD model: The air comes through the mouth and then up here to go through the radiator: And with the bumper on: I've got a sheet of aluminium and @Rhyscar has a folder, so this should come together relatively quickly. I'm starting with a blank canvas to keep it nice and tidy. After that's done the focus will move to building a fibreglass filter housing and air duct to join this bit to the air box. Discussion:

I've started on the list of jobs now, starting with adding bump stops to my new rear shocks. I wanted to make sure they would be protected from bottoming out. So I removed the springs and took the suspension to full travel. It looks super sweet with this much tuck. The diff head touches the floor: The top links touch the body: The top link bracket almost touches the body: And yet, the shock is still MILES from reaching full travel: This is great news for the shock as it will never violently bottom out and reach the bottom of its stroke. On the other hand it's bad news for the body and the handling characteristics over big bumps, so I need to sort it out. At the moment I'm planning on trying to space the bump stop down but I might look at going to a longer bump stop with ribs. After a bit of research it turns out they can be used as a suspension tuning tool - have a read about it here: http://www.superstreetonline.com/how-to/chassis-suspension/modp-1104-the-bump-stops-here/ I've also sent the front shocks away to be rebuilt. They've done a fair bit of work since the last rebuild!

Back in January I decided that it was about time I went racing again! I hadn't driven this car since Easter 2015, so it was well overdue! I had loads of jobs lined up that I wanted to do before racing it again... Needless to say I let life get in the way and didn't get around to doing most of those jobs... So did a quick oil change and took it for a hoon in January at the Taupo round of the Manawatu Car Club's summer series. This gave me a full day's testing on the Saturday and two classes to race in on the Sunday. Seat time is exactly what I needed! This gave me 2 lots of Qualifying and 6 races on Sunday. I'd recently started a new job and the racecar looks great in tow behind the big red Ranger: The racing was good and close, which made for a lot of mud collecting on my front bumper! The car was going well and I was back down into the 1:42's. I qualified second for IB cup and 6th for SS2000. Here's race 1 - it was going really well and I was catching Mike in the grey Levin until my throttle pedal linkage broke in the braking area of Turn 11... Managed to limp it home by pushing part of the throttle lever with my toe. DNF. Race two was better and I had an awesome battle with Ethan Coleman in his 12A Turbo Mini: Race 3 was a handicap race and was wet. Had a few moments but this is the standout. Missed 4th on the downshift, then dumped the clutch to fast when I found the gear - from then on it was a wild ride! The IB cup racing was good too! I qualified right at the front of the field and managed to stay at the front of the class for the whole race... But I broke out of the time bracket twice and got 20 seconds added to my time which put me 4th on the results. Race two was going really well for the first couple of laps, but Volvo rear bumpers are stronger than fibreglass AE86 fronts... Skip to 2:50 to see the hit. That dislodged my bumper and caused pretty bad tyre rub. Another DNF. So a busy race weekend and the list of jobs has only grown longer!

Will you still exist when this project is finished? Your resto thread has been a foundation of the forum for so long now!

Couldn't find the crank on the weekend sorry. Found a 4AGE one though, hah. They are roughly 500 x 130 which is completely useless information.

I'll try to measure one for you this weekend. My guess is that the total diameter will be about 200mm and total length roughly 650mm.

I was replying to Nominal's question about only being able to see the arc and not the metal around it. The issue you're describing sounds like the film is still on the inside or outside of the filter or the filter covers need to be replaced.

Lighting the area will help a lot but a lighter shade might also be a benefit. The one I posted above does shades 5-13. Usually 5-8 is only used for plasma cutting but I can imagine it would be ok for low amp mig welding too.

What settings did it have in the helmet? It sounds like the delay was set too slow or the sensitivity too low. I wholesale these helmets now - 4 sensor, huge lens area, all the adjustments and grind mode. We've sold a couple of container loads since November and they're doing well out there. Most places sell them for about $179+ GST.

I've seen this done before on a friend's car. We started with a complete Altezza loom (including most of the body loom) and got it running with a pile of extra loom in the passengers foot well and the clutch switch taped down. The next stage was a long process of cutting wires, testing to see how it ran and then removing un needed sections of loom. Not the fastest way to do it, but meant it didn't require a rocket surgeon to get it going.

Just a note on the free test day at Manfeild - it's not an open invite for all and sundry to come and play on the track for free. It's free for entrants and club members with the idea being that we can take our volunteers for rides as thanks for all the hard work they do. If you want to get on track I suggest attending one of the Envirowaste clubsport events: http://manawatucarclub.org.nz/find-enter-events/club-sport-series/ I'm open to the idea of running another OS trackday with the proviso being that we only use track 3 at Taupo because it's cheap.

More pics here: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1288007864649001&id=1118969521552837

Great meet tonight! Thanks to everyone who came along. We had an A+ turnout.

Come to Hamilton meet, you're all welcome there. May 18th at Burgerfuel Rototuna!

The local Burgerfuel team are really getting behind this! See you next Thursday.

Hi Sherry, glad you made it to the forum! Surely one of you guys must be keen for a $150 bonus this weekend? There's quite a few cars in Auckland that fit the bill!

You guys going to run another event? If not I'll un-sticky this.

Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/events/837040396450755/