No NC i wont be back till december

Just something quick; i added some tubes out the back to link the subframe and the struts together. Oh and im finally back from my trip to wyoming!

After a day of side projects, I came back today and finished the main tube of the door bars. they turned out great!

Short day, finished notching passenger side(?) door bar. Did i mention i plan on this being a single seater?

Keeping up the daily updates, i built the other half of the door bars and i started welding in the bars! I mocked up the a pillar (i held up two bars) and i seemed to forget how small the window is on these cars. Even worse is i plan on putting an anti crush bar that goes from the floor by your feet to the tip of the a pillar so in a roll over the A pillar doesn’t fold in. Anyway point is its gonna be a little hard to get into no matter what you do I THINK, small race car syndrome.

Tubular, Totally...

Finished welding on the door bars and my god was it a struggle for no good reason, it was just one of those days where you touch the tungsten non stop. It turned out really good so im not worried about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I set it back on its wheels because it felt like the right thing to do... and it was.

I got the old ej off of its sketchy perch and onto an engine stand. I gave it a much needed gunk treatment and undressed it to make it easier to mock into place
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Sketch perch: (ps that tool box its on is called a stack on, which i think i did to its full potential)

Woot! Great progress!

Hey im back from nebraska and i had a goodie waiting for me! Its a boyd welding fuel tank designed for a factory5 818. It came with an aeromotive 340 fuel pump, a 90-0 level sensor and a roll over valve. it sits so good here since the fron is no longer a good spot for the fuel. Im in love with it!!
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Wow, nice! Looks like it was made just for your build.

I know! I knew my insane amount of research would pay off

So how will you access the inlet? Open the door and slide the psg seat forward?

Very cool tank!! Im curious about the fill port as well.

Oh. I see it now. It’s on the right side behind drivers seat. An 1.5” blue barbed fitting. So you run some fuel hose to wherever you locate the fuel spout. Duh

Yep u got it, i figure the filler neck will come out around here

I spent way too much time planning and making a harness bar. First i set in my seat on a piece of wood, figured out my recline angle and the harness angle (about 10* sfi say 0 to -20 so im good i figure) and where that would land height wise on the main hoop. I then subtracted the height of the wood and the bar it was sitting on because i will almost literally be on the floor.

So now i know how high to make the bar... but oh boy was notching the bar a fun experience I think i discovered a 4th demension because this tube notch was so complex it would have stephen hawking lost. I made two dumby pieces so i could get the notch “right” I then made a template by wrapping paper around the tube and tracing. I cut out my shape, applied it to the real deal. Many hours later and here’s the tacked in product.
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Ignore the bar looking low, the seat is back at n the wood for testing purposes

Added one and a half of the legs on the x brace before i ran out of tube. The intersection looks funky because i had to make the harness bar land a little north of the intersection. Nothing a nice taco plate cant fix! I also gave the car a nice rub down in wd40. This typhoon of a summer we’ve had, my raw metal car didn’t take it lightly.
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You also can see how well the harnesses line up with the seat in its place

Update for the week: I continued my work on the x bar for the main hoop and got all but a 2 inch piece im dreading . I also added seat mounts, i made them out of some 3/4 tube and handy dandy universal tabs. I also had to cut out two of my floor gussets but i think ill live. And i must say i LOVE how i sit in this car, it’s exactly the way i wanted it. Now for some pedals and a floor
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Speaking of pedals i got a set of wilwood .75 master cylinders for the brakes. Their throw seems a bit short but it might be the same as the one i was gonna buy. They are a light set i bought at the used nascar parts store. I also got a used dallara radiator from a team penske indy car So you could say things are getting serious.
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Elliott, I know you know what you're doing far more than I ever will but, just for the sake of symmetry, can you put a bit of tube in here please. Thanks, Andrew.

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@andrewb Yeah thats the 2 inch piece ive been dreading. its too short to fit in my knotcher in a normal way that isn’t dangerous. Ill fix it this weekend because its been bugging me too

What about doing a taco plate in lieu of that 2" piece? Size it so you could add them all around that node set for extra strength and some style points?

I get that may not be as strong as adding the tube. Just throwing the idea out there - and you can feel free to throw it out , too!

Keep up the great work!

That's a relief Elliott - knew you wouldn't let us down.



Something's obviously got lost in the transatlantic translation - I don't even know what a taco plate is. I tried Google but now I just feel hungry.

Ha! Good one. Taco plate = sheet wrapped 180 that ends up looking like a taco shell.

ive got some taco plans, and taco plate plans as well. Im thinking on top of the harness bar, do people put bars inside taco plates? I kinda just wanna throw the sheet metal on there for style points

While it couldn't hurt, remember, a typical taco plate would have an OD (at the base of the taco) = the OD of the tubing you're using. So strictly speaking, if you had a tube there, the taco would need to have an ID = tube OD and would be 1 material thickness greater than the rest of the tubes - unless you went with a smaller OD tube under it.

@andrewb Fixed it! almost killed my drill though
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Besides finishing the x bar I also made up the bars to reinforce the front end and subframe mounts and i think it came out well. Tomorrow is a full day of welding because ive put a good bit of welding off on various things and projects so i probably wont have anything to report unless some massive insect comes into my garage (which is becoming scarily common)

A picture paints a thousand words ! Thank you - understood as soon as i saw it. I wonder what we call them over here ?

EDIT : For your information, and just to complete our mutual education, in the UK we appear to call that kind of part a gusset. Which ironically is also that small black triangular part you see over to the left in my avatar.

Then your drill almost died in a good cause - that little piece is a work of art all on its own. Even Tygaboy must be jealous ?
Carry on with the artistry, thank you.

The time has come to mate the motor to the chassis. At this point it’s sitting on the engine hoist. I need to remove the exhaust to allow it to sit a little further back (to meet the axle), which can only mean one thing; Custom headers. I planned on doing it anyway but if your gonna twist my arm... might as well. Another consideration is how low i can get it to sit and while i cant get the cylinder heads nearly scraping the ground like id like to, its really not bad and i think the fact it’s sitting 10’ in the air is throwing off my inner collin chappman. I highly doubt i go dry sump especially on a stock block like i plan but you never know what the future holds. Glad to be back again for the time being. Click to view attachment

Been a while again but back at it! I set the engine back in the car and got the front mounts tacked in place, and began work on the trans mounts. I really like the passenger side. its nice and compact. Ignore the butchered version of ians shifter linkage i will rebuild it i have the technology!
Ps ill also include some photos of what took me so long to get back to this build.
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good times at chump car roaf atlanta, built my 68 dart, finished just in time. got 88 laps out on track, finished 69th. Would’ve done better if my radiator (imagine that oil cooler in the fan shroud but bigger and full of water) didn’t get clogged with rust and squirrel nuts. But i had a blast and honestly i think 69th fits the car.

Very cool! I like the Dart.

Charlie

Alright i continued my adventure into mounting the trans. I built up the other mount and bent some tubes and knotched them to hook up to the trans. It’ll take some reinforcement to make it right but its a good start!
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Killer welds!

I have been meaning to watch the Doge episode....

So i took a few hours out of my day off today to “enjoy myself” and cut the 914 body apart. I left the garage today injured and highly just considering cutting the body in half. Now everyone knows the middle of the stock 914 body is where you need all the strength so when you sit in it, it doesn’t turn into a metal kinder egg with a human prize in the middle. This is still the case in my world but differently because the front half and the rear half of the chassis will want to bend their separate ways when i remove all of their structure. And i do mean all of it. the entire long will be cut out to allow the body to drop around the door bars. so that brings me to a dilema: Cut it in half square it upon the chassis and make those door gaps good. or make some dental style head gear to make it work and remain in one piece. Let me know what you think!

For reference the black line is where i have to cut to fit around the chassis and the yellow is the long.
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I'd say just cut the outer skin out and mount the pieces together on the flat ground getting the right gaps. The hoods will give you spacing for the right width.

Are you really going to make it a door slammer?

Do you mean doors open and close? yes, i figure why not

Me being a bit crazy, this is how I would do it. Orange tubes can be small 1"x1" stuff, and fairly thin walled, or what ever you have. Trianglulate the heck out of it, high to low. Top bar from factory roll bar to A pillar just helps keep it square. Other Option would be put a steel roof on it.

Then I would cut the logs out via otter skin, and then weld it back over the tub you could build out some gussets and it would look stock. If you wanted you could add AN fittings to the tubes running down the logs and run coolant or oil down them. If DOM bursts you have an issue.

Some will say galvanic corrosion will be an issue, but just add a replaceable zinc anode and replace it every few years. Most coolant mixtures will have corrosion inhibitors, you can just keep it fresh and call it a day.

Back to the diagram.

Just modify the locations to not hit your current structures.

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the green bars could be turn buckles you use to get your door gaps set, then weld in the rest to hold the gap and keep it from twisting.

Those are extremely good lines! This is basically my other idea visualized, it’s probably worth trying before i go the extreme route. Ill maybe begin giving it a shot tomorrow. Just gotta borrow one of those foul mig welders.

Hello Tazz9924 that's a lot of work that you've accomplished in such a short time. I'm also doing a tube steel chassis but with 996 suspension. I'm pretty much complete on my chassis and have moved on to body work. I'm trying to understand which way you are headed? Are you going to gut the inside of the 914 and "sleeve" it over the tube steel frame? I was wondering how did you get the suspension alignment locations from the donor car. I'm interested to know specifically in the vertical direction since they are not on a flat plane, at least not on the 996 suspension. On the 996 the front and rear suspension cradles have tilt to them that affects the entire suspension geometry. I don't know if that is the case on the 993. Also, do you know if your front struts are going to be able to clear the bottom of the front hood. I know that they didn't on mine. The rears were not a problem on my build but the fronts are. I'm removing my Mc Phersons on the front of mine. That is what I will tackle once the body work is done. Good luck with your build!!

Its 986 suspension actually, i basically went about it like this. I went out and measured a stock boxsters suspension geometry; strut bolt hole spacing subframe angles etc. Anything i could measure. I then transferred it in 3d space to everything you see here. The only assumption i made was full droop control arm angle. I looked a pictures and basically had to guess. If i set them too low compared to stock thats ok because ill use coil overs to level the control arms. Will it work? idk we figure that out. As far as the body goes im going to hollow it out remove all the structure and place it on top. I expect bits to hang out a little but ill find ways of coping with it (pods maybe). i can also set the body up a little higher and get good chassis hiding results. But safe to say it was a pain getting to this point, ill keep pushing!

Seems like a lot of work hollowing out that body for what is only going to be extra weight.

Even if you do plan to make it a door slammer, I say just skin the panels and put them in place. Your going to be making adjustments along the chassis anyways. You could weld some flat bar to the skin to keep it aligned just for laying it in place and cut the welds off when your done.

dzuts fasten the panels on and call it a day Lighter, Simpler, easier for doing work on the chassis or replacing pieces later.

well ill need the A pillar and headlight buckets, by the time im done it will mostly be skin but im using whatever will be left to hold the body in place temporarily. Shouldnt be a big deal

whoops

Well you made quick work of the rolling chassis, im sure you'll do the same for the body

What a crazy plan!... Love the progress

Just got some new wheels test fit on. I got a good deal on some fiske fm10s. 17x9 front 17x11 rear. i figure some 305-315s are in store for the rear!
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Love them! Looks like the tires might touch the coils?

Yeah also they dont like the hub so im going to use a 1” spacer