As I noted in my last post, I was working on removing the sound deadening material from under the seats and on the rear deck. All in all, I pulled out around 4.5 - 5 pounds of material doing this. I thought about pulling out the stuff in the footwells, but because it was so thin and covering a number of overlapping panels, I decided that I'd just paint over that stuff.
The cage is now full painted in black Hammered, and I just finished painting the interior in grey Hammered.
I've also been continuing to work on the wiring in the car. During some slow time while I was waiting for paint to dry, I decided to get rid of the wiring in the front of the car for the headlights. It needed to be done, but what started as a nice "simple" idea turned out to be a LOT more. I decided that rather than just cutting the wiring out, I would pull out the pins at their origin. In most cases this was at the fuse block. Of course while I was in there, I couldn't stop at the part I was working on. Next thing I knew, I had pulled out a bunch of wiring. In the end, it's worth it to have simplified the system, along with taking away the worry of something shorting later because of cut wires. One of these days I’ll get around to weighing all of the wiring I’ve pulled.
Since the 2011 season will be here before I know, I'm starting to move to the more serious (read, expensive....) items. The two major items are wheels and suspension.
In my quest to find 16x10 wheels, I purchased a tool to help me determine the proper backspace for the car. The tool effectively allows you to see where there might be fitment issues as it attaches directly to the hub and can be rotated through the full arc. Using this, I determined that a 6" backspace would be a good starting point. Since I'm apparently the first to try to fit 16x10s, I wanted to order up a less expensive wheel to start with to make sure my measurements were all good.
Unfortunately, the first two companies I contacted told me their wheels wouldn't fit with that backspace. Apparently the drop centers wouldn't fit over the brakes with this offset. The second company said their wheel might fit with a 5" backspace. Moving the wheel out that far would not only probably require flares, but it also would create a rubbing problem with the seams at the back of the front fenders.
A couple of people recommended that I contact REAL Racing wheels. I checked out their website and talked to them and it sounds like their wheels should work. I have a wheel on it's way to me and should be here on Christmas Eve. My fingers are crossed that it will fit. Once I verify fitment, I'll get one of my tires mounted up to do the final verifications, and then can order up the remaining 3.
I'm also finalizing my research on suspension. At this point the front runners are AST and Moton. Both companies now offer double adjustable shocks without remote reservoirs at a lower price point. I've heard very good things about the ASTs and my previous experience with Motons on my CSP MX-5 was quite good. I should be making a decision in the next week or so on this.
In the meantime, I needed to put together a gauge panel of sorts for my ignition/start switch and the factory gauges. After mounting my new steering wheel (a 320mm no-name wheel,) I realized that my initial thought of just mounting the gauge cluster in more or less the stock spot wasn't going to work. First of all, one of the attachment points would have been to the cage. I soon realized however that using the tilt function caused a problem with the mounting to the cage. I also quickly realized that I couldn't properly see the gauges through the smaller wheel.
After moving the cluster around, I decided that just mounting to the new center panel I was planning to install was the best option. Eventually I'll hopefully be able to get rid of the stock cluster, but for now, I need to keep it for the car to run.
I'm reusing two of the holes in the transmission tunnel that the stock dash originally mounted to and then have purchased a couple of brackets from Longacre Racing that go around the front hoop of the cage for the upper mounting points of the panel. I used 1/16" aluminum angle to form the side brackets and then picked up some 1/8" ABS plastic for the panel. It measures 9.5x15.
I had previously purchased a rivnut set for a previous project so this seemed like a great opportunity to use this awesome stuff. For those that don't know what a rivnut is, it's very similar to a rivet. However, instead of the rivet going through both pieces that are being joined, the rivnut only goes into the back portion. The beauty of it is that the inside of the rivnut is threaded so that you can put a screw through the front portion to join it to the back piece.
Since this panel will probably need to come off at times, either for putting other gauges in or replacing it later with something cool like carbon fiber, I felt it was better to use the rivnuts instead of rivets. Not only is the ABS now screwed to the brackets, but the ignition/start switch and gauge cluster are screwed to the ABS. One other thing that I couldn't have planned better if I tried is that the brackets turned out to be the perfect width to still be able to plug the wiring into the back of the gauge cluster.
The first picture shows the left bracket with holes drilled for the rivnuts, while the right bracket has the rivnuts already installed. The second picture shows the the panel attached with the ignition/start switch already in place. You can see the rivnuts in place for the gauge cluster in this pic also. I mounted the cluster using three existing bolt holes. The final picture shows it installed. It doesn't look super cool, but it has to be in the car at this point and it's solidly mounted and in my field of vision.
The next update will hopefully have great news of the wheel/tire fitting the car! Stay tuned.
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