one is older acceptance the other newer safer

I think the previous comment about door bars was more specific to the structure they were mounted to... that the roll hoop upright (front and back) needed to be more structurally sound to the chassis to support the impact to the door bar without ripping the cage mounting point loose....

not that door bars are bad, just that they are a part of the full roll cage system and all weak links be addressed...


Bob
awesome job
keep up the good work

Thanks Pete,
You gonna be at Daytona 24 at all? Or Sebring WEC/12?

Chassis is going to be powder coated. We couldn't get an exact Olympic Blue powder coat match, but we're close with a color they call Powder Blue.

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Funny part is...once the body is painted, it probably won't really LOOK any different than it does now - except the roll cage will be blue instead of black. Most of the work we're doing is for strength, longevity and handling...and will mostly be hidden from view.

What I REALLY need is for anyone that is going to track their car, autocross, race, etc to start buying their gear from us... so I can afford all this work...lol...

And no concerns about putting that much heat into the whole chassis?

I'm not suggesting that it'll be an issue, just curious because I was thinking of powder coating just the cage tubes in my car. A race car fab buddy of mine advised against it.

Interested to hear what you're being told. Thanks.

And your updates are looking great!

Does 400 degrees change the metal? I’m guessing it doesn’t but I don’t have proof either way.

It was suggested/recommended by Peter Dawe originally, then recommended by everyone I asked. It’s actually not that uncommon. More durable, and honestly much cheaper than paint.
You have to take EVERY grommet, gasket and anything rubber off, all screw holes have to have screws in them and all studs have nuts so the powder coat doesn’t build up, etc.

So I guess we’ll see...

Media blasting done. Looks really naked!

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some color

Do you have to remove all the seam sealer.

may smell cardboard smoldering..

Update....so we decided not to powder coat. I’m a bit disappointed but the reason is two fold:
1) seam seal. As Mr Epstein noted above, yes this is something I’ve thought about. The powder coater THINKS it MIGHT be ok, maybe...he said we could probably bake/burn it all off at higher temp, but would it damage anything? Plus we do have a lot of holes and duct areas blocked off with aluminum “caps” epoxied on. They would all come off or melt...or if the powder coat DOESNT stick on some spots, it will look like crap.

2) we couldn’t find a powder coat close enough in color to Olympic Blue...the original color of Papa Smurf and one of the colors of the outside. So we’d have to go with a different shade...meaning it won’t match and we’d have 3 very different blue colors on the car. Not what we want.

3) and...this is a race car. Powder coat or not, it’s going to get beat up a little, just general wear and tear. How do you touch up smapll areas and spots? Matching the color would be close,but not exact, so in the end it will look like crap.

So with so much uncertainty and so many opportunities for it to “look like crap”...we’re going the traditional route and paint it.

Bob, the car is going to look great. You made the right choice. Your #3 would be my #1 problem with powder coating an entire car.

The chassis I've seen powdercoated have been dipped first. Only metal left.

It's going to look great when it's done.

I've been a bit remiss in giving updates...thought part of that was the back and forth with paint vs. powder coat then scheduling the paint, etc.

So it went to paint last week.
We decided to change the color a little...make it a bit deeper and richer. So we went to 1975 Laguna Blue. We REALLY like how it came out! All the pictures make it look darker than it really is, but its really nice...still gonna do the dark blue section like before.

Here it is in the paint booth.


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Then we decided to put bedliner type undercoating on the bottom and wheel wells. Our tracks down here have a lot of sand and kicks up rocks and all, so the wheel wells get beat up pretty bad (as you can see from some of the pictures before it was media blasted).

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So yesterday we put the suspension on to make it a roller...

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This is the rear spherical bearing shock top that Chris Foley at Tangerine Racing sells....REALLY nice!


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and today he came home!

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Now comes the real work!!

If you are on Facebook, I created an album of everything so far...and I'm going to chronicle the build there and highlight some of the products we sell that we are either putting back in or are new. I'll do my best to post updates here too.

https://www.facebook.com/naroescapemotorsports/

Looks great.

OUTSTANDING!!!!!!!!

That REALLY looks great!

No offense to your old blue....but the new color is light years ahead of the previous one.
Outstanding!

Looks amazing!

The old blue was Olympic. That’s the original color of the car so we stuck with that all these years. But now we had a chance for a fresh start, so instead of going with something much newer or more modern, we just moved up 1 year and there was Laguna Blue waiting for us.

Ok, I know all you purist are having issues here...I know changing the color is going to devalue this otherwise perfectly preserved factory showroom stock car....but.....

Not sure if I missed it earlier... what size are those phone dials? They look really good on your car for some reason.

Those are Huey’s “track” wheels..16x8.
Papa Smurfs are 16x11 and 16x12...the smaller ones are just much easier to move around and not as much in the way.

But I agree...the phone dials actually look pretty good on a 914..

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Racing Huey again this year?

Your car is really looking great. I look forward to seeing it get resembled. Great job.

You may have already seen this, but on the start of the MY CLASSIC Car show a couple of weeks ago they paned over the car show and Papa surf was on there.
Later in the show there was a alaska blue 914 also.

New paint looks great.

[quote name='naro914' date='Jan 30 2019, 06:49 PM' post='2685014']
[quote name='raynekat' post='2685000' date='Jan 30 2019, 08:51 PM']
No offense to your old blue....but the new color is light years ahead of the previous one.
Outstanding!
[/quote]
Ok, I know all you purist are having issues here...I know changing the color is going to devalue this otherwise perfectly preserved factory showroom stock car....but.....
[/quote]

Priceless!

LOVE the color that is a huge improvement. Question, what coating did you use in the wheel wells?

You should have done from the sail upwards and the roof white like the smurfs hats, then throw on white wheels like their shoes

Looks great!

Stuff called Raptor Liner. My fab shop guys have had good luck with it. It can be tinted to color match, but we get so much black rubber on the wheel wells we decided to keep it black.

i had considered using that for coating the floor pan of my car when we painted last year but he used something else, which IMHO didnt work out as well as Raptor. i may end up redoing the whole bottom at some point in the near future, or atleast the area under rear trunk.

I really like the 'body color' look when someone shows the underside of a car, or from the side and all...but...we need to draw a line with a race car on looks vs practicality. I am NOT one to clean wheel wells after a track weekend (or ever for that matter), so we chose black. Oddly, Huey - which is more street than race - has always had black wheel wells and underside. Not liner, just black paint, but still...

Car is looking great. Whose camber boxes are on the front? Modified Tangerine?

I have been considering picking up a set but want to keep the gasket so that I can use the stock fuel tank area as a trunk but the current Tangerine setup seems to disrupt the area.

I honestly don’t know who’s camber boxes...they were done nearly 15 years ago by the shop I was using at the time.

I'm really fond of the way the roll hoop and the A pillars are tied into the roll cage with dimple died sheet. Its nice too see the 914 dash still in there too.

Few progress pictures: these are from last Friday. Lots more was done over the weekend including work on the dash, all the oil lines, fuel lines and trans cooler pump and lines installed and tightened. But everything was a mess and I wasn’t going to clean it up to take pictures, and now it’s up on the lift with the GT3 under it and it was sleeting and freezing rain today, so it’ll have to wait until it clears up...

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This picture is to illustrate the contrast from the original Olympic Blue to the current Labuan blue. We needed to fit the hood on to measure a few things with the cooler and fuel cell.

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Amazing.

Looking great.

Would you mind posting some pictures of your front suspension setup.

You just might, maybe almost have quite enough oil cooler capacity there....wow!
I like the burp line setup to eliminate air bubbles--ingenious....

Sure. I should be working on it tonight and this weekend and will take some current ones.
Here are a few old ones from years ago, but the set up is basically the same.
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Yeah...Peter Dawe didn't like the old cooler set up we had, so.... and yes, the little air burp line is very smart. Horizontal coolers tend to only fill half way because the air gap at the top of the lines have no place to go.

Thanks for the pictures.

Is that the ERP setup? What does it use for "ball joints"?

Yes, ERP. No clue about the ball joints...but a good question.
Shocks are Fox with remote reservoirs.

Update from this weekend. Started on the electrical..We have no idea what we’re doing with that but figuring it out as we go!! Biggest change is a new Cartek electrical kill switch vs. the manual one. Very different system and we’re moving the battery (among other things) so everything electrical is different. Plus, going to have a full AiM MXL2 system so sorting that out with what sensors we need and how they run. Nadine made a new dash face out of carbon fiber, but we still need to cut holes for switches and such so its not installed yet. Plumbing is done, brakes are bled with new Carbotech brakes. Lots of little things done...not as much as we’d like but getting there...

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Curious if you have any shots of the chassis tears? I have one that I need to take care of on my track car and was hoping to see how yours was repaired.

This is gonna be sweet...