In an effort to get more road-holding camber into the racecar I am ditching the offset ball-joints and upper camber plates and putting in some true camber-boxes into the front of the racecar. It is a fairly major operation with 3D locating of toe boxes into the existing chassis, and some substantial cutting into the chassis itself.
Used a laser and protractor to locate first cut line. Vertical cut lines in place, 6 degrees from vertical.
It took some serious courage of conviction to start hacking into the chassis once all the lines were drawn out. I had to cut out part of the support bar in the center which I'll weld back in later. Here's the first box tacked into place.
Then through the magic of the internet, an houir or so of grinding, trimming, and lots of re-checking the angles, the boxes are in, painted, and the support bar welded back in place!
I've been searching this winter for proper front-end aero for my racecar without finding anything satisfactory.
First I wanted to build some decent "diveplanes" for the car after successfully experimenting with them last year. I found out that they don't so much provide front-end downforce, but they somehow help evacuate air from the wheel wells and hence underneat the car. After studying a lot of pictures from DTM cars I fabbed these up out of 1/16" steel and powdercoated them gloss black. (Yeah, I recently purchased a powdercoating setup for the shop, nothing metal is sacred now!)
I think the trailing edge is way to aggressive after building them, so I'm going to cut down the swoop considerably.
I've also been searching for a decent splitter. The only ones I found for sale were made for standard 965 bumpers and not the ones with the integrated winglets. Even the ones that I found would fit would require a lot of modifications and didn't give me the drop and adjustability I wanted. Solution? Build your own.
I set the bumper on a large piece of 1.4" luaun plywood and traced the outline. Then I used a compass to draw a 2" extention past it, and also behind it to give me "adjustable protrusion."
I then cut them out with a scroll-saw. Now I had the pieces for two dimensions. I then took some long strips of heavy carboard (for flexibility in following the countours) and hot-glued them to the two form pieces. I think I need to strengthen the mold so I can re-use it later. I covered the blank in metal tape to give a good non-porous surface and coated the form in some spray-on tacky grease to release the fiberglass.
HERE IS THE MOLD:
1 quart of bondo fiberglass resin and about 7 square feet of cloth on it's way. Cut it into strips and layed out about 4 layers successively over a day. Cured under heat lamps.
I pulled the part out out of the mold, trimmed it, filled in the pinholes with more bondo filler and sanded it out. Painted today.
All-in-all I'm pretty happy with how the new aero devices came out.
Total cost of all materials: $55.
Labor - 15 hours or so...
Result? Pretty okay.
