Well my time has been far and few between with this project but its coming along quite nicely. Really happy with the way things are laying out and coming together to what I think will be an awesome setup.

I took some photos of the progress. Everything is in except the wishbone, which I fabricated up and its ready just to mount and the trans crossmember.

At that point everything will need to be final welded in, pulled out and painted and reinstalled/tested. Hope to get it done in the next week or so, but I have a guy coming up this week for a topend install on his vette, so nothing most likely will be happening this week..unless I take a day or so vacation but I did that this week to pick up some more toys for the garage ( Milling machine and chop saw from Grizzley, along with some other things to make fabrication in the future a little easier.)

I was particularly proud of the wishbone that I made up from pretty much scratch...turned out real nice...just want to add another cross bar to it once I have it in the car and know where everything else is going to be running with respect to it. To save on room and to accomidate the exhaust I am running the wishbone backwards off the rear and towards the back of the car. Should be pretty trick looking and give me LOTS Of room in an otherwise wasted area.

Here are the photos....hope you enjoy and let me know what you think. This project seems to be taking forever, but I only get an hour here or an hour there with the twins here now......its coming along and I have to thank the wifey a ton for putting up with my addiction.

















Hope you enjoyed the update!

 

 

Lookin' good Thanks for sharing.

 

Good stuff. What steps did you have to take to make sure that everything was mounted square and the suspension would behave like you want it to as far as pinion movement when launching, etc? I never fully understood that.

 

Lots of planning basically. What is most important is your instant center location or instant center "plot cloud". What I mean by that is your front bracket location greatly influences the options you will have for your instant centers (where the two 4 link bars intersect out in space). Basic rule of thumb is you want it 1/2 your wheelbase, then back about 5" and up about 5-6". So if you put your front brackets in the wrong location, then you might mess up your ability for the hole changes to give you the instant centers you want. So you have to plan carefully. Mine plotting of the centers came out all around that above given starting point/rule of thumb.

As far as keeping everything square, its actually easier than I thought it would be. Basically you just need to get the car sitting real level, then you can measure off the car to setup the rear along with some extra measuring and use of levels to insure everything is running square....then you start with the brackets. I did my front two first, then everything else is run off them. To make sure the front and rear brackets were running square to one another, I clamped steel to the front ones and to the rear,,,this squared them to one another and made sure they were also inline with one another. Using the inside of the frame also insured that the front ones were pointed directly straight back...which also helped.

She should be an awesome ride....and my car should be a PERFECT A-B-A test platform to tell us all how bad the IRS is robbing power from our setups. My guess is my car will run 1.2X 60' times once its dialed in....if it doesn't I will be disappointed (performance wise). Reliability I will be thrilled to go to the tracking KNOWING the car will be coming home in one piece.


Thanks for the comments..

 

Awesome project!
Bernie

 

Looks great Jesse! Having built two Pro Street cars myself, I know you are having a ball. Looks like you may be planning on doing some others in the future with all the machinery your buying. Good luck.

 

NICE welcome to the dark side, all you need is the extra nitrous kit i have and 8s should be no problem

 

hi jesse,
awsome work mate!
great job!!!
its a real credit to ya!
cant wait soon to buy the custom chip of ya!
wont be long now mate till ya send one of your awsome custom chips down under for my zo7 vette!
cheers
glen
Australia

 

Hey Jerry Haas, where's my chip

Nice job....i hope you're keeping the specs so you can do the next one even better