Archive for June 2011

Continuing on with my progress from last week I ended up finishing the frame for the scuttle.  I used 16ga steel and an electric nibbler to cut it.  The plasma cutter is super cool, but it seemed like a nibbler would be more useful eventually for cutting out non-circular holes in the aluminum, so I decided to pick one up on amazon and it turns out to be really efficient at cutting 16ga steel too!  Best of all there’s no heat distortion, which I sometimes found happened with the thinner steel with the plasma cutter.  I ended up semi-boxing the frame so its fairly rigid, and it will bolt to the frame of the car under the dash.  I’m still waiting on the aluminum that I ordered to arrive to totally finish it off, but I need to order rivets and clecos still anyway.

With the scuttle worked out I decided to take on the radiator, but first I needed to mount the nosecone.  I got my first experience with dremeling fiberglass.  Definitely use a facemask!  It produces lots of nasty dust that I’m sure is bad for you to inhale.  After about 5 minutes of making a mess I also started using the shop vac to suck up the dust immediately as I sand/dremel away bits of the fiberglass nosecone, that worked superbly well.  I wound up finishing mounting the nosecone as well (though I haven’t started on the radiator yet, that’s next) and playing around with what the hood + scuttle would look like thanks to some construction paper.  The scuttle isn’t quite perfect or symmetric; the problem lies with the “caterham-csr-style” tube that I bent and welded to the frame.. it slopes down a bit too far towards the sides of the car and it does so more on the passenger than on the driver side by about a 1/4″.  I’m trying to decide whether I want to take a stab at fixing this somehow (adding filler material, redoing the tubing, etc..) or just continue on with the thought that I can always fix it later if it really bothers me that much.  For now I think I’m going with the latter decision in the name of continued progress.

Next on my list are the radiator, mounting the headlights, finishing the tubing (4 more tubes left) on the csr dash, building the roll bar, and perhaps getting started with some aluminum work for the firewall and scuttle skin.

I’ve worked on the locost for 4 days in a row.  That is some kind of record for me.  Yesterday I got up around 8am and was in the garage by 9, and worked all day.  Today I spent a lot of time just staring at it, coming inside and researching, and repeating.  Also I’ve been ordering a lot of parts lately.  It feels great to get to work on the car so much, and also knowing that I’ll get to continue working on it at this pace for the foreseeable is thrilling.  Anyway, on to the updates.

One exciting thing I completed last week was the steering.  Previously I had shortened the rack and extended the tie rods, but last week I lengthened the steering column and came up with a Keith Tanner-esque mid-steering column support using a teflon pillow block.  I then completed the final brackets for the steering column, and voila!  I can turn the wheels.  After that I decided it was finally time to mount the gas pedal as well.  I came up with a simple bracket for this and played around with the positioning a bit.. there’s not much room in my pedal box since the engine is positioned so far back.  I’m pretty happy with what I settled on, but I definitely won’t be driving this thing with boots on!

With the steering and gas pedal behind me, I decided to take all the parts out of the car and do some final welding on suspension related and other brackets, and also to spend some time figuring out what to work on next.  I spent quite a while revisiting whether or not I wanted to do a full roll cage, or just a roll bar.  At the moment I’ve settled on doing a roll bar with side impact bars, inspired by this stalker:

I think this will be a fair combination of enhanced crash protection and streetability.  I wound up ordering 50 feet of 1.5″ .095″ wall DOM tubing to make up the roll bar.  While I was at it, I ordered 5 sheets of 4′ x 8′ aluminum sheet.  Its 3003-H14, which I hear is fairly maleable but still strong, at 0.063″ (1/16″) thick.  This will be used on the floor, the body panels, and any other aluminum items I might need to build.  Oh and in case that sounds like a lot more metal than I need, it is!  I just like collecting steel of various types and sizes for future projects, this practice of mine has already come in handy a number of times.

Besides the body work and the roll bar, I hemmed and hawed a lot about the dashboard and the scuttle.  It was a little tempting to me at this point to give up on my caterham CSR style dash, due to the increased difficulty of construction over a fiberglass dash from Kinetic Vehicles, but in the end I decided to stick with it.  I decided to forgo using the miata gauge cluster, and use aftermarket ones instead.  Additionally, I chose to try out a GPS based speedometer to avoid dealing with mating the mechanical speedo cable from the transmission to an aftermarket gauge (based on my research this did not sound very easy with the miata transmission).  Other than a speedometer and a tachometer, I will have oil and water temp, oil pressure, and intake manifold pressure gauges.  I mocked up with cardboard what it will all look like and ordered all the mentioned gauges from http://speedhut.com .

I’ve decided that my next sub project will be to finish the scuttle.  I’m going to build a lightweight frame out of 16ga steel and have an aluminum skin rivited to it – this assembly will be removable for easy access to the area between the dash and the firewall.  I’m looking forward to getting that all built.

Without further ado, here are the pictures for this post.

Nearly 4 weeks ago I walked across the stage at the Georgia Dome and received my pretend diploma.  I graduated, after 6 grueling years, from Georgia Tech.  This past year has been the most intense one yet, though its also been one of my best.  Unfortunately, due to working full time while doing full time classes, I didn’t manage to get much done on the locost.  Now that school is out of the picture, I have considerable free time at my disposal that will continue for the next several months at least.  Finally, I can work on and maybe even finish this thing.

Items on my immediate todo list, in no particular order:

• Build a portable stand for my JD2 tube bender I got last fall (this will get a separate post)
• Finally get around to doing all the reinforcements on the frame, i.e. diagonal tubing and gussets
• Finish the steering, which at this point entails finalizing the steering column mounting
• Finish the dashboard tubing

From my post over at locostusa forums:

“Well, now that my last post was made over a year ago, I feel its time to provide an update finally. For the last 6 (  ) years I’ve been working on my undergraduate degree at Georgia Tech in computer science. Happily, I can announce that I graduated almost 4 weeks ago!  The short story is that I now am going to be working on the locost quite steadily (as of this week) until its completion, so I ought to be posting updates here at least once every couple weeks.

The slightly longer story:

I started the locost project during my 3rd year, almost 3.5 years ago now. I was using my mom’s garage at the time, and didn’t have any serious obligations besides school. Eventually, I moved into a townhouse with another locost builder who I happened to know through our non-locost social network, and began to make some decent progress on the car. Then about 2 years ago I became heavily interested in tech startups, and tried to pursue one myself. That crashed and burned after about 6 months, and took my studies with it for the time being.

That was about 18 months ago. By this point I moved out of the 2 bedroom townhouse and into a 1br 1 car garage by myself, and decided to figure out some things – namely how to finish school. I was on the co-op program which is a 5 year program, and as it was I was looking to seriously overshoot that mark, and my grades had been somewhat scatter shot. Around December 2009 I decided to just work for the spring (of 2010) and not take classes; this allowed me to get my wits about me, as well as focus on the Locost a decent bit. I also decided to hold off on doing a startup (my ultimate career goal) until after I had finished college, since it was too distracting from my studies (and way more fun!).

Due to finances, and the expense of renting a 1 car garage townhouse by myself, I ended up continuing to work after I started back with classes last May. In fact, between May 2010 and May 2011, I maintained a full time load of classes, as well as averaging nearly 40 hours a week writing software to pay the bills. Needless to say I had very little free time this past year for the locost. Most recently I had another opportunity with a startup that I worked on with another guy for the last few months, and it was looking like after graduation the locost was going to have to continue to wait, but that didn’t end up panning out either for various reasons, so now I’m back to my original plan of working on the car a ton post-graduation.

I can’t express enough how elated I am to finally have the ability to work on this project again. The past couple years have taught me some serious lessons about the value of not focusing on too many projects at once, and I’ll admit that once or twice when things were really hard the thought crossed my mind to sell my project and get rid of the garage dependency. I always knew in my heart of hearts that I would regret bailing on finishing this car for the rest of my life though, so I’m glad I was able to pull through and now I can finally get back to it.

I’m sure anyone who’s taken a long hiatus from working on their car can relate, but I feel like I have to relearn a lot of things! I know it will all come back quickly, but I barely even remember where I was heading and what needs to be done now. I’ve spent a couple nights in the garage this week just staring at the car and scribbling notes on paper about what I need to do next and what I need to research. Boy how I’ve missed doing that!

I’m looking forward to catching up on everyone else’s progress too, and seeing all the newcomers since I last spent much time on this forum. Seems like its grown quite a bit!

-Jeff”