Before the week was done, managed to strip most of the sound deadening, stripped the engine bay and had the windows removed.
Had a 200-mile journey north to JP Cages, so with the help of @Wheelynutz started early this morning to get the supra transported from SRD HQ.
Few hours later, landed at our destination.
This is how the engine bay sits currently.
Using my poor Photoshop skills, the rough plan for the engine bay will look something like this.
The rear firewall will be welded and blanked off from the interior. Moving to a pedal box system to get the master cylinders & brake lines away from the hot exhaust side. Looking forward to this new setup as it will be aesthetically very simple and servicing parts on the engine will be a little easier compared to before.
The wiring loom will be moved to near where the factory slave cylinder sits with the use of some bulkhead connectors. I will continue to run a heater inside the car, but will be running some bulkhead AN fittings instead as factory HVAC will be deleted, so no further need for the factory heater line / AC line ports on the bulkhead.
The front part of the new cage will run through the firewall onto the strut towers, with triangulation running to a different section of the cage. As shown by the white lines above. Once the cage is in the firewall will be welded up, and after some further modifications will need a new lick of paint, but that will be a future job once everything is in place.
Left a few bits on the interior for mockup, so cage builder can get an idea on seating position and location of a few bits that I need clearance on. Will be changing to a different seat and seat mount setup, but the positioning of current setup is ideal for how I sit in the car.
The instrument panel reinforcement bar is going to get ditched completely as there will be a horizontal hoop support bar that goes in its place and the steering column will be mounted to that instead. My challenge to him was to get the door bars to fit around the factory door cards, looks quite tight but if it's possible then that will be great, if not will ditch the door cards completely, so will see what he can conjure up.
Also adding in some anchor points for anti-submarining section of 6 point harness and cleaning up some previous welding in some places. For now have decided to retain factory steering column, indicators and associated electronics as the interior section of the car will be running factory electronics for the time being as I can't afford to switch to a complete PDM based solution just yet, so will save for the future.
Apparently cage is estimated to be done within 3 weeks, so have some time to sift through my old parts and get them sold and start piecing together the engine whilst I wait.
Whilst the Supra was getting the cage done, had a few quiet hours today to start putting together a high level overview of the electronics and wiring locations for the front half of the car.
Not as exciting as new parts being installed, but a needed part of the planning process now so I can attack this as efficiently as possible.
This is more or less the idea moving forward, although I'm sure ill make a few adjustments. The next step after this is to start planning out exactly where each individual wire for every component will go and create a giant spreadsheet that will map everything out in great detail. From there, I can start speccing which bulkhead connectors and other materials I will need to implement the above. It's as fun as it sounds, very time-consuming!
Well, I had heard JP cages had a good reputation for turning around work in good time, but they really lived up to it. Cage is done and ready for pickup, wasn't expecting it so quick, so didn't even have a transport ready.
Here is the finished article
Had to lose the door cards as they were going to foul on the door bars. Josh didn't want to run the door bar inwards to clear the door cards, as that's a no-go with cage building. So will probably move to a different style door card or replace the doors entirely with some sort of carbon replacement that doesn't use door cards.
Need to make some brackets to hold the OEM interior fuseboxes in slightly different locations to normal, but most of the wiring will fit as intended for the interior, which is good.
Next stop will be to see James & Kane @ Retro Road Sports to get the firewall sorted and get some paint on the interior and whatever other small jobs we can find to do.
Michael Yazgic @ 0x33