A lot has happened since the last post... This may be a long one.
A lot of work and family events have happened the last few months, so work was put on hold a few times. That said, the car has come a very long ways..
I just looked at the last pic without the radiator installed and felt a bit nostalgic.
So that was installed.
As well as the Begi intercooler set up and piping that was ultimately removed.
The body work arrived and I rented yet another UHaul to pick it up. I also felt huge guilt for now having body work but no running car to install it on.
A few long weekends and we had the car running!
This thing is incredibly quick and handles like a go-cart!!
I now see why everyone has said getting the car running is half the battle. The huge pile of wires and endless list of small jobs are still taking a huge amount of time.
The car got to live at the apt for a month between borrowed build garages. I'm not sure I should admit how many times I went down to stare at it knowing it was a running car three of us assembled in a garage.
About a month ago I moved the car to a nearby garage that I'm renting from a coworker and had 2 weeks of PTO (Pretend time off) where I was jumping between conference calls at home, then skating 7 minutes to the garage down the street to go work on the car. I made a bunch of progress, and faced a mountain of frustrations in trying to put together a highly modified build.
1. The radiator. Upon trying to mount the body work I had to rip out the rad mounts and fabricate new mounts to lift the rad about 1.5" to fit within the bodywork. I'm using an aftermarket Koyo unit which apparently mounts at quite a different height than the stock unit.
2. The intercooler. The Begi intercooler was legitimately wider than the Exocet nose cone at the point it would be mounted. There was no way I was going to leave gaping holes in the side of that beautiful shape to accommodate it, so I called up FM and ordered their kit. My wallet still hurts..
The FM kit can be made to fit under the body work, but takes some effort to do so without completely squishing the tubes. I cut off the front-most leg of each lower radiator mount with a dremel to give the tubes as much space as possible and cut down both tubes that attach to the intercooler. On the turbo side it is a simple job of cutting a few inches off from where the tube meets the intercooler. On the intake side I found that flipping the lower tube and cutting a few inches off each side gave the best fit. I highly suggest this to anyone else routing their tubing inside the body work. The last bit of cutting was on the tubes that attach to the intake manifold to give more clearance to the reroute I added to the car.
A work of warning - THE INTAKE TUBE WILL HIT YOUR REROUTE ON MANY AFTERMARKET RADIATORS!!
I mentioned this on Greg in PA's thread. If you are running a rad that has an inlet nearly in line with the intake manifold you will likely run into clearance issues with any of the reroute kits out there. The FM radiator has an inlet way off to the outer side that would avoid this, I couldn't justify $500 to solve the problem so I scrounged Pep Boys for a ran tube that would go to the drivers side then tuck under the intake, I found one that was near perfect that then dropped back to the run on the reroute that goes to the back of the head. I'll have to dig up the PN in case anyone needs this in the future.
3. Body Mounts. I installed the Wayne Presley VCP bayonet mounts. I like the design of the side and top mounts a lot, I need to inquire about the lowers as they don't seem to do much on my car, the rad is the lower bayonet point at the moment, which has the same foam padding as the others.
I got to learn what true focus was when dremeling out the aerocatch holes. Locate 3x, measure 4x, eyeball position 10x, cut once! The catches came out great, and having the hood mounted feels like a huge milestone.
4. Wiring tray - I spent the better part of 4 days cutting, routing and soldering wires. I filled another grocery bag full of unneeded wires in addition to the bag and a half my girlfriend removed before we moved the car, and made only one overzealous cut that left me without a running fuel pump for an hour. When I pulled the OBD port I lost a connection from the megasquirt to a relay that both connected via a Y way up the run to the OBD port itself. A quick check of labels and I was able to re-complete the circuit. I can't possibly overstate the importance of labeling your wiring! My girlfriend labeled everything and it has made reassembly and modifications infinitely easier. I'll also have to get some pics of the engine bay since she thinned and re-wrapping everything with frame matched electrical tape. It is starting to look awesome!
5. Temp sensor relocation - Due to the reroute the temp sensor in the front water neck is effectively useless, so I tracked down a 1/8->3/8 adapter at O'Reily to relocate the AEM sender to the Begi thermostat spacer. I feel much better about relying on this now for accurate temps.
I knocked out a bunch of other small jobs one by one, now for some pics...
In the pics the rear body work isn't permanently attached to the mounts yet. I'm trying to lower it a little bit first as it seems to be stacked on some of the fuel lines as of now.
Next steps are parking brake, fuel filler, mount rear body work, create a "dash" for the extra gauges, possibly do a custom cluster cover (smaller) and install a Tein EDFC controller. Then the big next step, REGISTRATION!
IL doesn't appear to require fenders, so I'm going to try to register the car in the next few weeks, then put fenders on over the winter. I have some 0 offset wheels on order that should be here next week that I will get fitted with tires and mount to the car to mount the fender stays.
This has been a huge adventure, and it seems to be getting very close to the "end". I have a long list of small projects, improvements and customizations already in mind, so I don't think it will ever be done. I am extremely anxious to race this thing. I don't think I'm going to make it this year, but will eagerly await track days and time trials next year.
