Car Rebuild: Part 7

Part 7

As you become ‘used’ to something you tend not to realise or appreciate when things are wrong. Take the example of the ever widening waistline, few kgs here and there and all of a sudden without any warning you are 10kgs overweight. Well the same happened to our trusty Honda. 4-paint jobs and 3-vinyl wrap schemes later and lots of filler and all of a sudden we were almost 100kgs over our ‘sprint’ spec weight just 2-years earlier.

So the aim this time is to stay fit and light from the start.

For those that don’t know this is the old girl and whilst we moan about her putting on kgs, she did put us on the podium in 14 out of 16 races in 2013-14 so lets not be too hard.

Speaking of wrong (in the same context of the previous point) below are a few examples of our previous cage quality when compared to the new cage.

Previous centre section of the X brace:

New:

Previous door bars:

New:

As you can see the quality is vastly improved.

In the below image you can see where the floor was cut to drop the cage through to weld the top sections as mentioned previously:

Saluki reinforced the rear shock anchoring sections firstly to support the cage and secondly to give a robust foundation for the rear shocks to be fixed to.

We also went over the car with Saluki looking for areas were we could remove a little weight but not effect the structural integrity of the car. Below is one example of where we are able to remove a little bit of unnecessary metal.

Before:

After:

We have a carbon fibre infil panel to cover the new “hole”.

At this stage there are only three main jobs left:

1. Air jacks
2. Pedal box
3. Fuel cell

Click Here For Part 8