The Home Stretch!

I'm really pushing to get the car finished for a test day on June 8th and possibly a regional race that weekend.  So I took Friday off from work and since today was a Memorial Day, I was able to spend four days in the garage -- which turned out to be very hot!!  I made a lot of progress but unfortunately material for the blog suffered because I forgot to take as many pictures as I have taken for previous blog entries.  But here ae a few pics to at least show the progress that I have made.

With the help of my beautiful wife and crew (Terry) I was able to get the front suspension on.  It was a little difficult because of the suspension mounting within the bodywork in a number of spots and it is hard to get to those mounting points inside the car.

I was able to get both wheel speed sensors intalled in the front of the car.  The car came with one installed and I just copied the brackets to make brackets for the other side.  The sensor detects a magnet that is mounted on the inside of the hub and you input the tire size in the data system software as well as the number of magnets that the sensor is supposed to detect and the software can then determine the miles per hour.

I was also able to make my first gear change!  It probably took me about 5 times longer than it should have but at least I learned a lot and am confident that I will get better and faster at changing gears.

I was also able to get the rear suspension on the car and the rear axles.  There are CV joints on either side of both axles and I re-packed those with new grease.  I ran into some difficulties here in this task and had to replace a couple of CV boots but I figured everything out. 

Before putting the car back down on the ground I wanted to install some screens to keep debris out of the radiators.  I used some hardware cloth from Home Depot and decided to mount them to the ducts that sit over the radiators and mount inside the side pods. 

In order to give the screen more support, I mounted a piece of 1/2" wide aluminum along the bottom of the screen to hold it to the bottom of the sidepod.

Finally it was time to put it back on the ground!!  I used my engine hoist to lift the car and then lowered it on some stands just higher than the legs of the engine hoist. 

I was then able to work each end to the ground with my quickjack and here she is on the ground!

Next, I needed to make a seat.  Even though a fiberglass seat came with the car, all the things that I changed in the cockpit made it very difficult for me to use it.  Plus, I also wanted to try making a bead seat -- which is basically a bunch of small styrofoam beads that are held together with resin.  There is lots of information on the internet about how to make a bead seat but the first thing you do is determine how many beads you need by putting a bag of beads in the car and sitting it to determine if that is the right amount of beads.  However, before you can do that, you need to line the inside of the cockpit with cardboard to prevent the beads from getting in between the chassis tubes and other nooks and crannies.  Also, you tape some thick plastic over the cardboard and other areas to prevent the bag of beads from getting punctured.

The kit came with 12 gallons of beads and I ended up using 7 gallons.  The bag is a vacuum bag and you hook up a shop vac to it to suck the air out of the bag.  You can do this before the resin is mixed in with the beads to make sure that the amount of beads is sufficient.  After that is done, you mix resin in with the beads and put the bag back in the car.  You then get to sit in the car for 45 minutes with the vacuum running for 45 minutes.  The resin actually doesn't fully set in the time period and it is left in the car for 12 hours.  Again, Terry helped me through this whole process and we decided to do this last step late in the evening so that the seat could set overnight.  When I looked at the seat after I got out of the car, I noticed that some of the aluminum fuel cell cover wasn't covered by the beads so the next morning I cut a section of the bag away from that area and mixed a small amount of beads and resin in a food storage bag so that I could place them in that part of the seat.  I put a kitchen garbage bag over that area and sat in the car for another 45 minutes.  I had already started trimming the seat when I took this picture but you can see the rectangular area where the patch work was performed.

And here is a pic of the seat in the car with most of the trimming done.  Next, I'm going to cover it with gaffers tape and that will ensure that all of the beads are kept in place.

The instructions say to remove all of the bag but there are so many folds that go into the beads that I'm just going to leave the bag there and tape over it.  You can also glue material over the seat but the taping is obviously the quickest method.  It looks like it will work out well though!