Broccoli and Dessert

Big multi stage projects always have a mix of boring jobs with low gratification and jobs that are exciting to complete. With a preponderance of the former. Sometimes I think of this as the "broccoli to dessert ratio." The past week started with a lot of broccoli jobs. 

Like rebuilding the front calipers and installing all the calipers and pads. I now know why people just pay Autozone for rebuilt calipers - it's kind of a hassle. Especially getting the seals to seat properly. Also contributing to the broccoli-ism of this job is the need to repeat it on all four corners. So, not terribly exciting, somewhat frustrating, and repeat times four.

This would be a good time to mention bro Ray's BFF Paul who is an actual real life mechanic. There have been about 7.5 million times in the project where I came to a juncture and wondered "is this normal?" Paul has the experience to know the difference between "oh, yes, they're always like that" and "that can make your car catch fire in the middle of the night and burn down your house."

Is this a normal amount of surface drag for Miata brakes with new rotors and pads? I don't know but Paul does.

Then rebuilding the shifter. Not exciting, plus, a turret full of disgusting goo (a mixture of the original gear lube, along with Brown County dirt road dust and water that had leaked in over the years). So a yukky cleanup job, then replacing the seals and bushings and other wear-out-able parts. And all of this ending in anti-gratification, because I actually liked the shifter feel better before. It was nice and light with good crisp engagement of the gears. Now it's heavy. I even put back some of the old parts, thinking the wear over the years might have had some benefits. No dice: still a thick, heavy shifter feel.

Another feature of low gratification jobs: when you're done, the overall progress of the project doesn't look much different than when you started.

Yesterday started out like broccoli again. I had the day off and with a whole free day it seemed like a good time to get the frame painted. Which starts, of course, with prep work.

I don't know why I'm still surprised by this, but a lot of the projects I undertake, ostensibly for fun, wind up being a lot like washing the dishes. Here I am scrubbing the whole frame over with etching solution, which chemically roughs up the surface of the metal so the primer has something to grab on to. Surprisingly, a chemical that can rough up steel has the potential to cause unpleasant burning sensations on one's skin. Don't ask me how I know.

After prep, I shot PPG/Omni 2 part epoxy primer. Painting tube frame chassis is really tricky. There are a lot of inaccessible nooks, corners, and crannies you have to shoot paint into, but can't figure out where to position the paint gun to actually get at them. Not to mention a great deal of lying on the ground and shooting upward. 

This did start to turn gratifying toward the end of the day:

I am inordinately pleased with this light green color I'm using for the frame, subframes, and other heavy duty parts. I've seen a similar color on original Aston Martin DBR-1s as well as high end replicas and a couple of Miata-based Replicars like mine. It's an acrylic enamel intended for farm equipment (more info about this paint on the previous blog post titled "Progress on Various Fronts.") I'd rate this paint job as "acceptable." With the difficult access and angles, there are a couple of spots where the paint went on too heavy and made drips and a couple of spots where it's a bit too thin. However one advantage of enamel paint is that it's very easy to touch up - so I'll have a chance to fix the most bothersome of these later down the road.

There are a lot of good reasons to follow the MEV/Replicar builders' groups. Help and advice, obviously. Encouragement, obviously. But also it's inspiring to see other people's finished cars.

If built according to plan, the Replicar has a gap between the frame in the door sills and the bodywork - as seen here:

This builder put a lock box in that space:

Pops racer had some concerns about the chassis stiffness through this area as well as minimal side impact protection. We discussed some fixes, including welding in extra frame rails to triangulate. But this picture inspired a thought: some of Pops' race cars use aluminum boxes as structural and/or safety elements. Notably, on his space frame formula cars he uses a box structure in the nose to 1) provide structure to support the downforce of the front wing, and 2) serve as a crush structure protecting the driver if the car crashes into something nose-first.

A structure like the lock box above, built with some internal baffles and riveted more firmly to the frame, could add stiffness and a layer of crush protection (in addition to a handy not-obvious place to lock stuff up in an open-top car).

Frame stiffness makes a big difference in a racing car where fine suspension tuning to complete a lap 0.25 seconds quicker is the difference between winning and 10th place - so Pops' urgency for more stiffness in this part of the car may not make much difference for a weekend toy car like this. But Pops has been safety engineering racing cars since the early 1970s so if he says the car will be safer if I put boxes into that space, I am disinclined to argue.

Another inspiring picture. This is Scott Graham's car. Scott is from East Kilbride, which Google tells me is in South Lanackshire, Scotland. His build blog is worth a look (with a lot more practical technical content than mine). Scott did a lot of his own upholstery in a gorgeous red leather and it looks fantastic. He also put a supercharger on his car, and from the videos he's posted it looks to be scary fast. I have not seen his car in person, but just about every picture of it I've seen has at least one bit of handiwork that inspires admiration for his skills. I like how he did his wheels: reminiscent of an early Dunlop alloy wheel - one of the first alloy wheels used on a racing car. And yes, the original wheels had bolts right around where Scott's lug nuts are - but they were still center lock wheels with spinners so this treatment does look "period correct" if you're familiar with the originals.

Also, the oddly-spaced tubes in the grille are just like the original Aston Martin DBR-1's. It's kind of a strange look, and I've seen multiple attempts by people to come up with a different treatment or a more updated look - but I actually like these and will probably do my car the same way.

I keep getting the impression that kit car building is a much bigger deal in the UK than it is here in the US. It appears to be a much more mainstream hobby and they have magazines, stores, and even car shows to support kit car builders. UK car parts vendors routinely have kit car items in their catalogs, often very high quality (and priced to match). Among US car enthusiasts "kit car" is almost an epithet and evokes the image of a grotesquely overdone exterior concealing cobbled-together mechanicals. For whatever reasons, kit cars don't seem to have that aura in the UK.