Well ladies and gents, I’ve gotten enough done now that I guess it’s time to share some of the torture… I mean second job… I mean loving hobby… I mean progress I’ve done so far on the car. This is an INSANELY HUGE update pix-wise, so enjoy. After taking a week off of work and pulling 10-14 hr days every day, plus working evenings and at least 5 hrs over the weekends (hard w/ gf and classes all day on Saturdays), I can confidently say I’m making some progress
.
When I left you off before, that was 90% completion of the front end. I was unable to proceed from that point until I got the rocker panels made and ready to go, but I couldn’t do that until I had the rear arches addressed, etc. So this is a recap of what I went through, as this is some of the initial work I did on the car when this progress started (as you can tell, as there is still paint on the car in some of the pictures!).
One of the biggest issues I was having with the car while on the track was rubbing when under load in the corners… so best way to fix this? Yes, widen the fenders, but also raise the lip to make some more clearance inside the wheel wells! So I started off by dropping the car on its bump stops in the rear and seeing how much I can get away with removing!
Pass side marked up:
Outer skin removed:
And the inner skin lifted:
Then came the fun... Time to break out the big guns and start removing some undercoating so I can start welding. Have I mentioned how much I hate the undercoating? Almost falls close to my love for fiberglass at this point…
Weapon of choice:
And the aftermath (and more reason why my cousin is a tolerable SOB and my neighbors dislike me… lol). Mind you, I did this work in Feb/Mar timeframe, so it was cold outside… hence the closed garage door. Plus I was doing this at night, so I had to keep garage door shut the noise down so I didn’t piss of the neighbors more than I have already!
[imgs]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-O7iBBitASHs/TYAkmqnYS6I/AAAAAAAACgI/e4-d0THNN0w/IMG_5959.JPG[/img]
And once the air cleared:
Once all the undercoating was gone, it was time to start clearancing! My goal was to have about 1-1.25” clearance between the top of the tire and the edge with the car at full drop. This is lower than I will ever keep the car, as the suspension geometry is completely borked (a-arm pointing upwards), but if I do drop it this far, there’s still plenty of room for compression w/ my 600lb rear springs.
And beginning the trip around the circumference of the wheel well:
Since I was stretching the metal in the wheel well, I had to cut some reliefs in the liner in order to get it to match up with the outer skin. Took a bit of finagling, but after a while I got it figured out:
And filling the unnecessary holes:
Then time to rinse and repeat on the pass side:
And the aftermath:
And just to give you an idea how much lower the car is/tire is tucked
At this point, with the front fenders roughly complete and plenty of room for the rear wheels, it was time to figure out what to do with the rocker panels. A while back, I had taken forms from our UrQ project to get a rough idea of what the rocker panels should look like. Because I had the front fenders haunched out more than stock, I had to adjust the rockers as necessary as well… so this was merely a starting point.
So in order to get a rough idea on how to start the template, I sided with one of my favorite childhood materials!
Roughly on the car:
And the final template:
With that complete, it was time to make the rockers. I had tried to farm this out to a couple machinists I knew, but unfortunately the setup cost killed the deal every time. I had tossed out an email to the UrQ list to see if people would be interested in buying them so I could make a bunch to lower the costs, but b/c I wasn’t 100% certain they’d be a great fit, I didn’t want to risk sending out a bad item. So instead, I ordered a 4’x4’ sheet of 16ga galvanized sheet metal and began the fun on my own!
From this point, I cleaned up my old template and did some measuring to make sure I laid everything out correctly to get bent:
And with my crappy little HF sheet metal break, I made a mock up piece:
Turned out pretty good if I do say so myself
. Not too bad for a shadetree mechanic!
At this point though, I hit a small dilemma. No one around me had a sheet metal break that could handle 4’ long piece of 16ga sheet metal. After asking around, a co-worker pulled through in a big way and was able to bring me to a local art school that had an ancient, but serviceable 8’ break. This thing was in a world of hurting and took a fair bit of finagling to get it to make a proper bend, but after some work, it came out pretty damn good.
In action:
And what happens when you bent it a little bit tooooo far… oops:
But after about an hour and a half for all 4 pieces, this is what you get:
From here, I started the process of prepping and priming the rocker panels. Since everything was stripped to bare metal, I figured tossing on some weld through primer was a good idea. I do have to say though, I don’t like this stuff. While it is suppose to be weld through, I had a helluva time actually welding to it. I’m not sure if it was the settings I was on (though I doubt that as they worked when welding on bare metal to bare metal), the gas I was using, or what, but I couldn’t get the weld to puddle on the primer without really nuking it, and it would end up getting the sheet metal (unprimed) too hot and then pop and send molten hot metal all over my leg/arm/foot. Needless to say, I was swearing a lot during this process… but I digress… lol.
With the rockers ready to receive, next step was to splice the pieces together. The rocker panel from front to rear was just shy of 6 feet, so I had to add 2 feet to each panel in order to cover the span. Thankfully I was consistent enough with my bends that I was able to do this pretty easily:
Once the pieces were made long enough, thus began the fun of offsetting the rockers to match the haunched out front fenders. This was a crucial part, as this also helped me figure out the necessary offset for the rear fenders as well! So after a ton of swearing (moreso b/c I didn’t have strong enough magnets to hold the new rocker panels onto the car, and the tape was hit or miss with how well it would stick when trying to adjust the rocker on the car), I was able to trim the rockers as necessary:
And finally, tacked onto the car… this was a pretty big moment for me. I probably sat there staring at the car for a good 15 min, as it was slowly starting to shape up!!!
Next came the fun part….
THE REAR FENDERS!!!Being that the UrQ is a two door, and I wanted to keep the 4000 a 4 door, this made things a wee bit interesting to say the least. I did a lot of staring at the car trying to figure out exactly how I wanted to do this, but by using the knowledge that I acquired building the front fenders, this was a LOT less daunting of a task than it would have been.
First off, I had to do some clearancing on the flares themselves. I wanted to stick with an entirely metal rocker panel vs. using fiberglass as they’re just more durable. So my initial step was to cut off the bottoms of the rear fenders that were the remains of the rockers on an UrQ:
Then came the fun of measuring, measuring again… and continuing to measure in order to find the center of the arch on both fenders. Unfortunately, again, these fenders were a little tweaked, and not consistent between eachother. Why? I really have no idea, but the pass side arch was off by ~3/8” when compared to the driver’s side. Not the end of the world (esp considering the havoc I went through on the fronts), but still frustrating.
So here the fender is mocked up on the car w/ bumper (will cover that later) held up to give me an idea of what I’m working with:
Once I got everything centered where I wanted it, it was time to figure out how to make the car a 4 door again. It took a bit of pondering, but the solution was actually a lot easier than I anticipated. Simply template the door, then transfer to the flare… yeah,
juuuust that easy
And look, ma… 4 doors again!!
In the pic above, you can also see the bracing that I started to put on the door to support the new flare. I initially started to do it similar to what I did on the fronts (basically make a c-channel of sheet metal, one side on the door, one on the panel), then realized how crazy I was to try to double bend and rivet the flanges onto the door. The curves were just too complex for me to get away with that, and it also dawned on me I have this nice new Miller welder that I picked up for this project, and it made welding sheet metal a TON easier than my old HF special.
But after some finagling, measuring, and time with my tin snips, I was able to flange out the door area pretty “easily”:
Next came the fun of flanging the rear! Being that this portion of the car wasn’t going to get any fiberglass covering, I was a little more anal with the fit/finish (not show worthy, but still a little cleaner than I did in the past on the covered stuff)
Gap to fill:
Filling:
And the90% completed side (to this point, it took me about 8ish hours I believe? Painfully slow process):
Then rinse and repeat on the pass side (and try to make it even, which wasn’t easy considering this was the side that hit the tire wall, so I wasn’t working with an identical surface unfortunately… but I got it damn near close or within 1/16”)
And then came the fun of making the front/rear of the flares match the doors themselves and provide some support for the fiberglass that I laid:
And then fill in the gaps by the door sills:
As I had mentioned previously, once I got the flares hard mounted to the sides of the cars, the differences in the flares started to show their ugly little heads, unfortunately. The biggest issue was the leading edge of the flare in the wheel well. For some reason, the profile of this flare was different on the pass side than it was the driver’s side… and not for the better. It made the opening around the wheel about 3/8” narrower than it was suppose to be. After measuring, and measuring again, and again, I decided to just do some chopping and make it how I wanted it to be. Frustrating, but what have you:
Once this was complete, it was time to get the rocker panels to match the flares. I really wanted to stay away from fiberglass again in this area, as by the time I was done flanging it, I could have made it in metal.
Thankfully I had one piece left of my rocker panels, so after a fair bit of measuring, finagling, cutting and welding you get:
I did a happy dance at this point, as these really completed the look of the car. A small task, but made a huge impact on the overall look of the car.
At this point, it was time to start prepping the panels to make up the gaps that I created when cutting the panels up. Unfortunately, I found more surprises in this flare that I was LESS than pleased about. I believe what happened was when these flares were made, there were air bubbles in 2 places. Instead of just throwing out the piece and starting over, they cut the areas where the bubbles were, put them back in the mold, filled the problem areas with filler, then fiberglassed over again. As you can see, it was a hellacious mess:
Nothing else has been easy on this car, so why should I expect different at this point I guess… lol. But I digress. Overall, these rear flares were LEAPS and BOUNDS better than the fronts, so a small hiccup like this wasn’t the end of the world.
After a fair bit of time grinding and prepping, the pieces are ready to go on the car for some glassing:
Out comes the foil yet again!
And the finished products:
And just a side note… be careful what grinding disks you buy!!!! I bought a pack of 3” cutting wheels from Lowes (not cheapies like HF, or so I thought). The disk was brand spanking new when I went to cut off a rivet holding the panel on the car… the disk literally exploded as it touched the rivet, sending pieces directly up into the 8’ light fixture over my head, shattering the bulb, which finished shattering over the back of my head!!! Thank God my I wasn’t positioned in the line of fire of the piece; as I’m not sure my safety glasses would have stopped it at that point… notice the dent in the fixture!
Once all the panels were off the car and ready, then came the fun (and ungodly messy… have I mentioned I hate fiberglass yet?) of making them moderately smooth! So 3 hours with a vacuum and my angle grinder w/ 60 grit flapper disk and you take this:
To this:
Have I mentioned how messy this was? This was WITH the vacuum running to collect dust as I was going… I blocked the filter, filled the canister on the vacuum AND I looked like I blew up a cocaine factory in my garage:
This was on top of the “work bench” (i.e. the old hood for the car
)… there was an equally big pile on the floor to boot!
The vacuum:
My head afterwards:
At this point, the roughing on the fenders is complete… next up was the bumpers!
About 3 or so years ago at this point (just to let you know exactly how long I’ve been planning on doing this… lol), when Martin first started his SQ project (oops… yeah, it HAS been that long, hasn’t it?), I had messaged him to see if he had the bumpers still. To my surprise, he had them, and his price was so good I didn’t even blink before I put a check in the mail!! So once again, thanks Martin for the deal!!! Hope their use lives up to your expectations
The catch was, I was in VA Beach at the time and he was in Canada. Fortunately, the 4000/CGT/UrQ is a very tight bunch to say the least, and through the kindness of a fellow QW’er (Thanks, Steve and Frank), the bumpers were able to be convoyed down to Carlisle where another fellow QW’er (Thanks, Rob!) shuttled them to NoVA, where I picked them up and shoved them in the 4000 and drove them south again.
All safe and sound at home (miss seeing the ‘ol girl with paint on her skin… lol):
From there, it was time to assess the pieces. Being that I wanted to start with a clean plate, I decided that they needed to be sanded completely down to the bare plastic… but little did I realize how overly involved this was going to be! To say these bumpers have lived a tough life is probably an understatement. I counted about 5-8 layers of different colored paint (shown later on), and the amount of filler where it was gouged, dented, etc was amazing! And that doesn’t even cover the parts that were not repaired that were cracked, gouged and cut… lol. Regardless, Martin made me well aware of their condition, but for the price I wasn’t afraid to put in a little sweat equity.
Time to start the fun:
Sanding….
And sanding….
And sanding…
I believe the rear was the most beat up piece in the grand scheme of things… lot of hidden filler, and layers of paint of course…
But at one point, this car was silver, then black, then blue, then golbi, then silver again… with various layers of primer in between…. Lol!
But fast forward about 3 years, ~24 hrs of labor and a huge pile of this:
And you got 4 pieces that were completely stripped down to the plastic and ready for installation today
I started off with the rear bumper. When mocking up, it became quite evident that this was not going to be a simple plug and play (surprise surprise!!!!). When holding the apron up to the car, the edges were standing off a good 2.5” from where they were suppose to meet the lips around the fender flares. Oh goodie. After doing a lot of searching online and finding every picture I could on UrQ’d 4000s, it became evident that some trimming of the bumper was going to be required. At this point, a buddy showed up and we went about making a template of the top of the bumper so we could get an idea exactly how much needed to get trimmed off the top of the bumper to get it to fit:
After measuring about 100 times, I finally got everything marked out… and began to cut. Let me tell you, I really haven’t been too nervous about cutting into this car during this whole project. When doing this, I was legitimately nervous, as plastic isn’t as easy to “fix” if you f’ up! That and it’s not like I can just go to the local junk yard and snag another UrQ bumper… but thankfully, our measuring pulled through and no big issues to report about:
Once the apron was fitted, I needed to tackle the core support. After looking at the UrQ rear bumper shocks/support, it became pretty apparent they weren’t the same bolt layout as the 4000. At this point, I took a chance and tried the 4000 core support/shocks on the UrQ bumper outer shell. To my surprise (and delight), it was going to fit!!!!!! It required a little trimming of the ends as well as a couple new holes drilled to accept the fingers that hold it together, but overall… IT FIT!
And once trimmed, I tossed it on to see how it looks:
Of course, I can never be happy with what I have, and wanted to tuck the rear bumper a bit more than it was at this point. In the past, I’ve read a few different ways on how to successfully do this… and honestly, I wasn’t a fan of any of them. One was to drill and drain the goo that allows the bumper to compress in a low speed collision. The next was to rethread the bumper shock further, which wasn’t feasible as a) I didn’t have the proper die and b) the taper on the shock wasn’t right and would have been a royal biznitch to thread… so I took a new direction… option c!
Being that I had the 4000 shocks and the UrQ shocks, I decided to make a hybrid shock mount that allowed me to thread the bumper shocks in further, thus allowing me to tuck the bumper more.
So I started off with this:
And ended with this:
Which resulted in this:
It’s not as tucked as others have done, but unfortunately if I brought it in any closer I was going to need to trim off even MORE structure on the bumper (it was hitting the unibody of the 4000), plus it was going to look a little weird (to me at least) as it would have almost no a$$! I want my girl to have a lil bit ‘o feature back there, so I decided to let it stick out a little bit. From there I made up some supports in the wheel wells to hold the ends of the bumper, as well as some supports on the back to hold it up on the underside and keep it rock solid. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures of that, but rest assured… it looked good
Will try to snag a few when the bumpers off again.
With the bumper on the rear though, it pointed out another area that needed to be addressed on the 4000 body… the exhaust outlet. The UrQ exhaust port on the bumper is closer to the center than the 4000, and of course, there is hard metal there and not just a big glorious open area for me to move the exhaust outlet (cue grinder and welder). So below shows exactly what I ended up doing. I was tempted to extend the opening all the way across the back end, but decided to stop making more work for myself! There was really no point in doing this other than for “looks,” and in reality this is covered by the bumper anyway, so no harm no foul.
Opening it up:
Welded up:
And cleaned up:
This pretty much concludes the major work for the rear end. I still need to finesse the rear flares, fix the gaps and bond them to the car, which I will cover later on I guess.
As for the front… well… let’s continue (as if this post isn’t long enough as is).
With the rocker panels back on the car, I was now able to figure out exactly how off the bottom portions were to the shape of the rockers… plus address the gap b/n the fender and the rocker. As par for the course with these front fenders… it was ugly. I had wracked my brain for a bit trying to figure out exactly HOW I was going to make these things line up, AND keep the fiberglass stuck there and not look like $hit. Then it dawned on me… I still have my template of the rocker panel… which means I have a mold!
Came out pretty good for an impromptu piece and only having foil as the release
At this point, it was time to start grafting them to the fenders… so I did some grinding/trimming and positioned them in place:
With the pieces roughly held in place, it was time to start glassing once again…
And after hours of sanding and glassing and sanding and glassing, I finally got a decent fit that I was happy about. The unfortunate part of this was that it pointed out a glaring issue with my initial design on the vents for the front fenders. The more and more I looked at the gap that went top to bottom on this fender, the more it looked completely unkept and unfinished looking. After checking out what Hadyn had done w/ his flared fenders, I decided that I needed to trim down my openings a bit, as they were just excessive in my mind for how this car is going to look. Plus, when looking at the STIs or GT-Rs (no I’m not comparing my car to a GT-R, just the vents
), the vents are only 1/4 way up the fender vs the entire thing. Granted their vents are a bit bigger, but these will still fill a purpose. So after doing a fair bit of measuring and mocking up, this is what I came up with:
And finished:
In my opinion, this version looks a LOT better than before. Even if it’s not as functional, it’s a lot more aesthetically pleasing to me, which is all that matters in the end, honestly. But this is how the fenders sit as of now. I still have a bit of cleaning up to do w/ the gaps and everything, but I need to weld the caps on the rocker panels (front/rear) before I can truly finalize the gaps. As of right now though, the front flares are ready to be bonded to the fenders, which is a huge milestone!!! I’m finally starting to feel like there’s light at the end of the tunnel here.
And finally for this post, prepping the front of the car for the front bumper… Ever since I put the Euro lights on the front of the car, the lights never squared off correctly to the mounts. Not on my self made one OR the actual authentic one. But when you mounted the brackets on the lights, they fit great! So given that the front sheet metal on the car was chopped to high hell to begin with, I decided to finish it off and remove the remainder of the original structure and add in my own mounts.
Out with the old:
Position my minty new euros with little to no pitting, perfect reflectors and only one damaged tab:
Figure out how to fill the gap:
Weld, rinse and repeat:
And loosely fit the front bumper
So that’s about where she sits right now. I have to do some serious adjusting to the front bumper to get it to fit correctly with my intercooler, so I will cover that later on as I’m hoping to snag a plastic welder this week and move forward. Hoping that I can finish it up in the next couple of weeks so I can send it off for prep and final paint by mid July, which gives the shop lots of time to work the car over and get it back to me so I can (wishfully) have it ready for Watkins Glen at the end of August. The goal is there, so hopefully I can fulfill it! Would be a fitting track to make her first appearance!
Hope you enjoyed the show as always… until next time!
