So a little bit of back ground to the build:About 15 years ago I was visiting my brother and I saw his neighbor had an amazing sports car parked up by his small garage. He called me over and asked for assistance in moving the car into the garage, which meant that three of us picked up the back-end of the car and rotated it 90 degrees to align it for the garage. I couldn't believe we could move a car by hand. Now I can't remember the details about the car other than it had a dry sump, I will find out if it was a Caterham, or Westfield, or Locost. Also the neighbor was going to night-school to learn Carbon fiber layering. But I fell in love with the look of the car.
Skip forward 11 years and I finally sobered up, literally. I had become an alcoholic through the years and back in February 2013 I sobered up. I started working on a beat up VW beetle to keep my mind occupied, fixed it up and sold it. Turned out I had a knack for working on old cars. A few years and cars later I ended up in 2017. I decided I wanted to build a car from scratch, primarily to use up a bunch of parts I had accumulated over the years. This was the result:
I was stoked that I could actually build a car from scratch, this gave me the drive to build the Locost and when I told my friend about my intentions he said "i'll race it". He already races Miatas in autocross (scca) with quite some success locally. The car sizing (pedals/steeringwheel/seat etc) will be built to his specs primarily. He's pretty close to my size so I will get to drive it too.
I had downloaded the plans a few years back and printed them out and put them in a binder, I dug out the plans and after a little more research realized I printed out some +442 (or something) plans. I knew that I was coming into an older Volvo rear axle so I decided to go with a more traditional, smaller book frame. I printed out the book frame plans and purchased a few sticks of the 16ga steel tube for the frame. Initially Just to play with to see how I got on.
Now after doing more research I see that almost everyone uses a 'build table', I unfortunately do not have garage space for such a luxury so I figured build outside (again) and just be super careful with my alignment. As I got further down the line I built a 'subframe' from super thick 1.5" square tubing and clamped that to the underside of the spaceframe while I was building more of the chassis.
Donor parts turned up and the build continued. I started on May 17th according to my facebook picture album, and while my parents were in town during June I didn't touch it. So i'm probably 3 months into building at this point (September 5th 2017). My work schedule allows me to work quite a few hours per day on the project. I work my regular job from 3.30am through 11.30am, so i'm home just after lunch, then pick up my son from school at 3.30pm, so maybe 3 hours of actual building per day.
I'm using a mix of fluxcore welding and mig welding, depending on what part of the project i'm doing and weather conditions!
Basically the tools I'm using are:
Harbor Freight Steel chop saw
Very old vertical bench drill,
Harbor Freight 90amp Fluxcore
Eastwood 135 Mig
3x Angle grinders; a Craftsman 4.5" With blade, a DeWalt with flappy sander disk thing and a Harbor freight with a wire wheel.
Makita hand drill and impact wrench
A grinding wheel on a pedestal
All my heim joints (rose joints for us Brits) and weld inserts, tabs etc come locally from my local 4 wheeler rock crawler guys at Midnight 4x4. Nice little basement walk in store with a plethora of parts and super friendly staff. They also do DOM tubing cut to the foot so that's super useful too.
So back to the build:
A friend of mine had spoken to me about a 'spare' Mazda rotary engine he had that he would sell me for a couple of hundred bucks....deal!! Later he said he would trade it for a bit of welding work on one of his cars. Well a few conversations later we loaded up the carb-less 12a Rotary into the back of my Volvo wagon XC70 and drove it home:
I had no experience with rotarty's but figured I'd make it work, it fit like a glove. I played around with a few Mukini motorcycle carbs and finally settled on actually buying a cheap knock off Weber IDF off of ebay. Then I built an intake manifold (which I still have to rebuild) And with very simple wiring got it to run. Hopefully this URL with show 10 seconds of it running:
https://video-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t43 ... e=59AEC082Anyway, after the success of the first run, that then allowed me to focus on radiator, oil cooling, fuel pump etc.
I went to get my driveshaft ordered up and when my driveshaft guy (Dale at Drivelines Utah) said I should go with a larger diameter I went to change the input flange on my rear axle I realized that it was the only thing holding the diff together! So I ended up swapping for a different rear axle/diff that I had on another one of my cars. The downside to this was the axle is 6" or so wider so this made the book frame look pretty narrow, but i'll work with it. On the good side, the new rear axle has disc brakes (opposed to drum) and a different wheel stud pattern which allowed me to run the wider wheels that I actually wanted. I did have to buy adapters to change the front stud pattern, but I think it's worth it.
That's about where i'm up to. Driveshaft will be ordered up this week (finance depending) and i'm hoping for the rear fenders at some point soon. With this being an outside build I really want to get a lot of this buttoned up before the cold attacks, Winter is coming!! I will get the hood built this month, racing starts in the spring and I don't want to loose my momentum on the build.
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