Making Progress

I haven't had much time to post blogs because I have been working on the car in the evenings after work and of course on the weekends but I am making progress and I'm confident that I can make the F1600 Pro Races at Summit Point this month.  K-Hill Motorsports really helped me out as far as getting the frame fixed.  I dropped it off with them two Sunday's ago and they got it sand blasted and had a welder replace the bent bars.  I got the car back the next Saturday!  Luckily the frame was not twisted so it was a little less work to fix it.  Here it is after I got it back.

Good as new!!

In order to save some time and some money, I painted the chassis with some chassis paint that is brushed on.  I can't say that the paint job is a good one but most of the frame is covered by the bodywork anyway.

You can also see the side panel to the left of the frame.  While the frame was getting repaired, I was working on that.  That repair was pretty straight forward.  Just fiberglassed and put some kevlar on the backside and filled in the cracks with short strand fiberglass putty and bondo on the front. 

A fellow racer genorously offered to sell me some used sidepods (tops and bottoms) at a good price so I purchased those.  The tops were just like mine but the bottoms were actually a different shape at the back. I didn't expect this so this meant more work. You can see that my sidepod (on the left in the pic below) is straight in the back and the one I bought is angled.

So I had several choices.  I could 1) either repair the crashed one, 2) modify my tail section to fit the side pod I bought, or 3) replace the crashed front part of my side pod with the front part of the sidepod that I bought.  I decided to go with option 3. 

I took some measurements and made a template out of cardboard in order to trace the same cutting pattern on both sidepods.  It would have been easier to cut in straight lines but I decided to cut a jagged edge because I figured it would be stronger and the two pieces would fit together like puzzle pieces.

Here are the two pieces being fitted together.  I made sure that I fitted them with the sidepod mounted on the bellypan of the car.

Unfortunately I didn't do a very good job of determining the point to cut on side of the sidepod. 

No worries though, I filled it in with spray insulation foam that I bought at Home Depot.  The pic below shows the foam as well as the two pieces joined together. 

I mounted a piece of aluminum to the bottom and used a construction adhesive between the aluminum and the sidepod as well as between the edges.  I used 1/2 inch countersunk wood screws to attach the aluminum to the sidepod.

I ground down the points of the screws on the topside and put a piece of fiberglass on top.  Once I had the two pieces joined, it was just a matter of fiberglassing the remaining cracks and applying some bondo on top.  Here is the finished frankenpod with the smashed up bit next to it.

And here are the pieces mounted to the chassis.  They just need paint now!!

And here is a pic of the chassis after today's work.

So, decent progress but it is full steam ahead until it is done!  I would actually like to have my scoop done before the pro races as well but I'm not as confident about that -- it certainly isn't as important either.