Build Progress
The car is slowly coming together. At this point, the front suspension is completely assembled in final form. Nylatron bushings to replace all the stock ones, 8 new ball joints, 4 new hubs, 4 new drop uprights, V2Arms, BWR rear toe links, BWR front swaybar, BWR Penske coilovers, and BOE floating rotors. The rear is mostly assembled, but I’m waiting on getting the motor and driveshafts in before bothering to attach the new uprights and hubs.
My order with BOE was completed today, and it should be shipping tomorrow. 10.5:1 built Nikosil-lined motor, Rev400TVS supercharger kit, a ClamHinge, the stage 2 tuning kit, and a bunch of supporting ancillaries. With any luck, I should be making ~330-350rwhp out of the gate, and can go up from there as needed/desired, with lots of safe room in the motor. I’m going with an E153 transmission conversion (by MonkeyWrenchRacing) and putting a Kaaz 1.5-way diff in it, and that’s currently being built by KORacing in Portland. Hopefully that will also be done in a week or so, to arrive in time with the motor parts.
One of my big angsts with the car has been knowing that I need to cut the clams quite extensively to fit the larger tires. Thinking down the line to the inevitable resale value, I started looking into getting cheaper replacement clams to put on the car and cut, and put the stock clams in the attic, to be put back on whenever the car is to be sold. I found that OnRailsEngineering has deals on aftermarket clamshells for a quite decent price, and ordered a front clam which I’ll feel a lot less bad about cutting up. A local Elise owner had a clam that had sustained a puncture from a loose battery bracket, who sold it to me for a distressingly reasonable price. I had a local body shop check it out and they can fix it for almost nothing, so that will be what goes on the rear half of the car. It’ll still hurt quite a bit to bust out the sawsall, but a lot less than if it were the original body panels. The ORE parts won’t arrive until near the end of January, which is probably around when the 10.5″ wheels will be done as well, so the timing should be good.
The west coast schedule has moved up a bit this year. The San Diego events are the last 2 weeks of March, so I’m down to a hair over 3 months to get a car built, tuned, and sorted if I want to make those, with the Crow’s Landing events soon after that. I’m desperately trying to get all the parts together in time to have the car running before the new year, but there’s a couple straggling items that may push it into the first week of January. The build is coming together a lot faster than the Miata build did, so I’m cautiously optimistic, but things could still easily fall apart if a single critical part gets delayed, of which there are still many in the fire…