GRM Exclusive Reveal: Exocet Spec-A

Warren v wrote: Thanks Keith. I think you nailed everything there. One of my FSAE buddies from Tech is going through the same color conundrum:

That is killer looking! The reverse would be sweet too.

Make the blue a bit darker and put a big 18 on the hood, and it would fit right in around here.

Actually, that nose reminds me of something...

Seriously, I think you need to tone down the orange. That's an orange car with some blue, when viewed from the front 1/4. From behind, it's probably about half and half. Gulf is mostly blue with some orange accents.

Said friend likes the colors more than the livery, I guess.

Keith Tanner wrote:

mrvwcastner wrote: I am at the stage of removing wiring etc.. From my doner. Can someone post a link to a build thread or something else that will help me do it efficiently? I pulled every body panel today (was kinda weird gutting a perfect car 0 dents, shiny paint, one of the cleanest early NAs around). I'm hoping to be a rollerskate next Sunday. Is there any reason I shouldnt store my rollerskate on a 2 post lift?

I doubt you'll be able to lift the roller skate on a 2-poster. As for the wiring, just keep digging into the car. There's no magic secret, it's not really designed to be a serviceable item.

linuxd00d wrote: I was planning on picking up a $175 junkyard subframe, but I keep hearing mentions of a tubular option. Is it the $850 V8 Roadsters part, or is there a cheaper alternative out there? I'm not looking at spending 5x the price of a used stock part...

Welcome. You'll learn that people love to boast about how cheap they can do things around here. The magic $1000 donor is not as common as the internet would lead you believe. Your choices for the front subframe are a junkyard part or the $850 tubular item. There's no middle ground, mostly because the volumes aren't high enough to allow for less expensive custom options. New custom stuff does cost more than used stock in most cases, though. Unless you can weld. For the Gulf scheme, I'd go with a black frame and baby blue panels. Then the stripe. Contrasting the frame would be difficult to get right, you'd end up with a lot more orange than usual for this Gulf colors.

I would concur with Keith, a black frame would work best. You could always paint/vinyl wrap the body parts at a later date if you grew tired of the paint scheme, not so easy with the frame.

Thanks a lot guys for the quick feedback and Warren for the preview. That was extremely useful. I love the colors, but I agree with Keith, it needs to be a blue car with orange accents.

I can see a couple options:

a) As suggested go with a "low impact" color frame: black or light grey. Get the panels in baby blue. Add orange accents later via vinyl and such. The closest example I can find with an exo car is this Atom (no, I'm not comparing the two cars): http://www.refined-marques.com/Ariel-Atom/ I think the light metallic grey works very well with the light blue. I'm having a harder time picturing the black frame in that scenario.

b) Get both the frame and the panels in identical baby blue. Again, add orange accents later via vinyl. I wonder if painted plastic and powder coated metal in the same RAL blue will look exactly the same. There's a big difference chemically between the two processes and materials. And if they reflect the light differently or look just a little off, this could look cheesy.

What do you guys think?

I like that, the grey works better than black would have.

I suspect black tubes would get rather toasty for the arms too. :)

Pickup day!

We've got two more for Friday. The uncoated cars really speed up the lead times, as we don't have to do the whole powder coating dance.

WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANT WANMWAMWJWANBAKJWKJAWBKJAWAJKWT

I have no money, and even if one dropped in my driveway, no money to race it, but I want it, oh boy.

Alright shipping company, this is getting a bit silly. 6 frames in the shop (7 with XP-3)? Not cool.

Are they just waiting for new bodies to arrive?

If Warren's facebook posts are to be believed, they're waiting for empty trucks to take them to new homes.

New homes is correct, mine being one of them.

Warren - you should put a map up on your webpage with a pin for each town that you ship one to, at least until your orders get too numerous to keep track of such a thing.

I like the map idea. I'll add it to the List-of-World-Domination underneath "Sport Windshield".

There were a few mixups with the shipping company this week. First a no-show, then they brought a truck with room for only one small pallet, then they were able to take all four cars at once yesterday. We made sure the people responsible for future pickups got to see what we are doing, and now they're all excited to help us in the future. Working with vendors is so easy when you have a fun product.

Warren v wrote: Alright shipping company, this is getting a bit silly. 6 frames in the shop (7 with XP-3)? Not cool.

I'm thrilled to see you guys doing so well. I may or may not be a customer one day, but it makes me happy that business is booming for you all. What a great success story. Even better that it involves cool cars!

Warren,

I saw that you used FM's VMaxx coils, which is what I too am using. First what dampening did you end up choosing? And second, how high/low did you adjust the height?

One other question, when do you expect to have body work completed, and shipping?

In reply to dyintorace:

We're actually using AFCOs on XP-3, but that's only because we want shock dyno charts to dictate shock valving later down the line with engine-swapped cars. If XP-3 wasn't a test mule, it would have V-Maxx coilovers. Ride height is still bouncing around, but a not-scary configuration is:

Front jacking point 5.25" off the ground Rear jacking point 5.5" off the ground

It's what I would recommend as a starting point.

In reply to SteadFast:

That's the big question. We get the first of our CNC-cut buck skeletons tomorrow morning. Female molds will hopefully be ready for the first couple pulls by the end of the month. Thankfully our new Georgia Tech Co-Op is awesome and is quickly taking charge of frame production, allowing me to focus on bodywork.

Warren v wrote: Thankfully our new Georgia Tech Co-Op is awesome and is quickly taking charge of frame production, allowing me to focus on bodywork.

You saying my frame is going to be built by an intern? That sounds somewhat scary

You should meet this guy, he's quite capable of managing the production process. He's not doing the actual welding, we still have CWIs laying the beads. We're not one of those companies that has trade school students doing the majority of their frame welding.

For what it's worth, at certain checkpoints, we have no less than four sets of eyes doing QC on every frame. I'm very proud of our frame quality, especially with the new process we've adopted on the last dozen cars.

Ok, good. I know you guys are under a heavy order load right now, and this is probably one of the hardest stages in your company's life from a growth management perspective. This is the phase where so many companies screw up and quality slips. As a customer with my order on the books, I'm glad to hear you're paying attention to good processes and QC :-)

On the topic of processes, I've been wondering: since you've done what seems like a lot of re-engineering to improve on the original MEV design, what kind of peer-review multiple-set-of-eyes approach have you taken on the engineering side? As a random example, if you made some human error that would cause every frame to fail quickly due to metal fatigue, would someone have caught it?

In reply to linuxd00d:

Good question sir, I've been waiting for someone to speak that language. The design went through at least 30 iterations (most were due to the incremental FEA-driven design and material selection). I talked to engineers I met through my student competition days and a few of them were even sent CAD files to review. We had a good bit of support during the design phase, as it's easy to find engineers that want to put their touches on a project as cool as this one.

Besides that, here are some facts that will put your mind at ease. The frame is many times stronger than it will need to be, mainly because the design was driven by bending and torsional stiffness rather than strength. At a 3g front bump, the highest stress in the frame is something like 10-12 ksi, and that's a little concentration in the firewall that was designed to collapse in a controlled manner in a frontal impact. Everywhere important should stay well below the endurance limit during track use. The loadpaths in the car are very spread out, especially since the floor is a stressed member (unlike the UK cars). I keep an eye on the MEV forums, and I've never seen fatigue issues on the hundreds of UK cars running around since 2010, and that one is, um, extensively cantilevering many of its stresses in various locations. The second US car we built has accumulated many hard laps (definitely in the hundreds) at various tracks in the southeast without problems. It is meticulously maintained, and I feel the customer would have seen cracks in the powdercoat if there was a particular trouble spot. Obviously

Also, since we retain the Miata subframes, most of the sharp point loads are distributed before they reach our frame, which adds a nice bit of insurance.

As for me personally, I have been designing high-end modular wheel centers for heavy cars since before the Exocet redesign. Those are independently physically tested after my FEA'd design, and well, I haven't killed anyone yet.

I was just wandering your website, and came across the Enthuzacar Exocet Single Exhaust. I was curious if this was:

A) In stock

B) What size the piping was

Jason at Enthuza makes his exhausts to order. He has the NB Exocet jig ready to go and is quite speedy in getting the orders out.

The standard size is 2.5" with a high-flow Magnaflow muffler. We can work with you if you want a 3" exhaust. Both of the exhaust systems span from the downpipe/header to the exhaust tip. We're also working on an axle-back.