so the car runs now and is super fun. even on 5psi. need to get it on a dyno to see afr and make sure all is good before turning it up to abouttttt 10psi. currently mapping out how we will start the body swap. hoping to have some progress pics in the next few weeks.
It has been many moons since posting here. Most of you may have thought that the swap no one asked for was dead, im here to tell you that sadly its not.
Today we made progress and found our groove. We know what direction we are taking this thing and it will be......interesting....
Beholdeth...
Here is the hood just sitting on the car. No mods. Just to give us an idea of what we are up against. As you can see. The solstice is considerably wider.
Then using a chalk line, we marked out the 2 sections we would cut to make the hood 3 sections. Originally we wanted to go in half but decided it would be easier to have it in 3rds.
Here is a representation of how much we cut out of the fenders. Pretty much everything short of the support thay was tied into the wheel well.
Pontiac Spitfire Prowler anyone?
After cribbing everything up and countless measurements, it was time to tack this newly cut tri-assembly back together into a much wider assembly.
The front and rear were now tack welded together using the thinnest peice of rebar i could scavenge from the newly constructed neighborhood dumpsters up the road.
Lastly, using these (whatever the heck they are) also found in the same dumpster, we decided to "stitch" or "lace these components together and leave the openings in the hood. The openings are conveniently over the nice little silver powdercoated intercooler piping.
We swapped the sides of the factory solstice hood hinges and flipped them end for end. Doing this js going tk allow us to mount the new hood and open it like the stock sosltice clamshell does/the stock spitfire opens. We have some dirt cheap hood pins we will use up near the wiper cowl. For the rest. Eh, we will figure it out lol.
Cool. Looking at this, it probably won't be too difficult to find another Spitfire bonnet to cut out those sections from if you decide to go for a more finished look.
that is going to be insane
We may finish it one day. most likely not. its definitely challenging. the hood is the "easy" part. the rear section im not looking forward to doing...
For the TLDR folks: Florida man discovers cutting wheel,sawzall, and plasma cutter; proceeds to create abomination...
Things are happening at an alarmingly fast pace around here. Today was huge. We mocked up a cheap spoiler i got and then made supports from some dumpster metal and a piece of leftover square stock from a trailer.
Centered it up and took dozens of measurements. Made our own plumbobs using some kite string and nuts. Tacked it down and made some final tweaks before fully welding it up.
See below.
Now that we had the wing mounts and braces fabbed, it was time to start tackling what would presumably be the most difficult part of this build, the rear half. Following the same procedure we used up front, we measured everything out and marked it, used a chalk line to strike the cut lines, then began hacking. This time we used a plasma cutter to speed things up as the rear was a lot trickier.
A little secret about the wing stands, they were also intended to be used to have mounting tabs for the rear quarters, ay ohhhh.
So we hacked up the spitfire rear. Jankily tossed on our intentionally larger cut pieces, and you can see where this is going...
We have some trimming and fitting to do but the architecture is there. Very excited to button it up and take it for a spin with its new (old) body!
This build is just my kind of crazy. Super excited to see what you do next.
In reply to surfshibby07 :
With your approach to the hacking it up and leaving it open, you MUST call it the
Split-fire.
TM.
you're welcome 😁
I NEED a side view of this beast!
is this still under budget? or was that never the intent? i'm afraid i'm gonna need more than just rattle-can stripes...
🤘🏻😎
Very cool. I like the concept of keeping the panels open, but would also LOVE to see it "finished" with the panels filled in.
OPINION INBOUND
I think the front would look great with the first 12" or so of the hood filled in to be a continuous strip. The rest of the hood leave as is.
For the trunk I think it would look best to try to fill it in.. but maybe cut at the top of the license plate mount and connect that to the sides, and cut along that line until the little bumperrets and then go down leaving the back kinda open. That would look real nice IMHO.
In reply to nocones :
I REALLY like that front end idea.
I'm not sure I can visualize what you mean on the rear.
I am digging the "transformer in mid-transform" look. The car is almost literally bursting at the seams :) Just attach everything with dzus fasteners and send it!
BTW, this is an S2000 that a friend saw at a recent Lemons race - I think in CA.
Indy - Guy said:In reply to surfshibby07 :
With your approach to the hacking it up and leaving it open, you MUST call it the
Split-fire.
TM.
your welcome 😁
I actually really like that name lol.
In reply to wvumtnbkr :
Soon... lol
nocones said:OPINION INBOUND
I think the front would look great with the first 12" or so of the hood filled in to be a continuous strip. The rest of the hood leave as is.For the trunk I think it would look best to try to fill it in.. but maybe cut at the top of the license plate mount and connect that to the sides, and cut along that line until the little bumperrets and then go down leaving the back kinda open. That would look real nice IMHO.
So we are planning to fill in the first foot or so of the hood. Probably for reasons you may have thought, directing airflow into the air filter as well as preventing too much air from getting underneath and causing a ton of lift/drag. That being said, the panels are very modular. We plan to run it full bodied as well as a kart. The lights the car uses are separate from the panels for that reason. Despite it looking cool and raw, i want to see what it does in each portion of the event with the body on and off due to its added weight. The rear will be difficult to fill in. The wing bracing could have mounts on the inside as well and make it all the same elevation, we just havent decided yet. The biggest challenge as you could imagine is doing our best to transition the wheel well/body line from the solstice to the spitfire. But we also plan to cut the wheel well out so it may look continuous.
In all honesty your car has been my main inspiration for the car. I wanted wide flares like you used but there are too many reasons we didnt do it. Was it possible? Yes. Would it have been worth it? Imo, no.
In reply to AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) :
By the very skin of our teeth, yes. That being said i still have questions on the "trades going towards recoup." My understanding is once you have hit max recoup on an item you can still trade items, but it goes down as fmv against your overall recoup? If thats true, im not sure how to capture that kn the spreadsheet.
surfshibby07 said:In reply to AngryCorvair (Forum Supporter) :
By the very skin of our teeth, yes. That being said i still have questions on the "trades going towards recoup." My understanding is once you have hit max recoup on an item you can still trade items, but it goes down as fmv against your overall recoup? If thats true, im not sure how to capture that kn the spreadsheet.
There is no more "max recoup per item"
2000challenge.com/rules says:
Ok, so then the originally paid for price column in the recoup tab is irrelevant now? Previously that was used to track how much recoup you had left from the item. Just dont want to fudge anything up.
CrudeAF but this is the idea I had.
surfshibby07 said:Ok, so then the priginally paid for price column in the recoub tab is irrelevant now? Previously that was used to track how much recoup you had left from the item. Just dont want to fudge anything up.
i think so. not sure if there's an updated budget template to deal with this. I modified the 2023 template, but i don't have it in front of me so i don't remember exactly how i did it. i'm happy to share how i did it, but i don't have access to it right now.
In reply to nocones :
Its not impossible, but going to be difficult given the mounts. All depends what we can get done before the challenge. Currently, we are focused on final mounting everything then will come back and fill in stuff with the remainder of the free sheet metal i have.
Off to its new home, ironically not far from where i got it and from where the owner before me got it, in NSB.
Sold it for half of what i paid. I got 200 for it, which honestly, is about 200 more than i thought id get.
His plans are for a locost variant.
We have functioning headlights! These will be mounted on/in the crash bar as we still want to be able to remove body panels and see how the car peforms as a "kart." I picked these lights up at a garage sale for 10 bucks ~5 years ago. Was waiting for an opportunity to use them lol.
They work perfectly on the factory fog light switch. For some reason the headlights wouldnt work and we are too close to the event to chase down pointless issues.
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