IRS Rear suspension

A few weeks of effort has gone into jigging up, then cutting up the donor Soarer IRS rear subframe followed by some careful alignment as it was tack welded into place in the chassis followed by lots of cutting and welding to get it secure in it's final position.

1ZZ FE engine to J160 gearbox adapter

I've spent a busy few weeks fabricating the adapter between the engine and gearbox.
I started off with a 16mm 400x400mm alloy plate as well a 4mm 400x400 transparent polycarbonate template and milled out the 76mm centres to locate the crankshaft accurately as the reference.
I carefully drilled out each hole for the engine and gearbox bolts and dowells on the clear template and them transposed them on the alloy plate.
I had a pair of helicoils tapped/fitted in the plate for the starter motor bolts as I made provision for the starter to be bolted to the plate rather than the plate to the starter - this will allow future removal of the starter without having to remove the egine/gearbox and seperating the engine/gearbox just to be able to access the OEM bolts.
A lot of counter sinking holes and tracking down suitable bolts/nuts to hold the combination together.
After everything was test fitted, the plate was trimmed down and linished to the adapter ring as pictured.

Engine mounts and start on pedal and seat position

Engine and bellhousing positions have been roughly set - would have been nice for the engine to sit a little further back and a little lower but this seems to be the best compromise for footwell packaging and sump longevity.

Note the ~12 degree lean of the 1ZZ as a result of the OEM sump/pickup design.

The 1ZZ has no provision for engine mounts when used in a north south position, so after much consideration I settled on the design below which attempts to spread the load over a number of different bolt mounting bosses on different planes.


I also made a start on fixing the seat mount position relative to the pedal position.

Seats are Whitepointer ADR compliant seats covered in marine grade vinyl running on MX5 rails.

Pedal box is a modified Arrow assembly.

Basic chassis construction complete

Another big day on the MIG - I finished tack welding all the rear (C1) chassis together and I then started final welding the rest of the chassis moving around regularly to minimise distortion from excessive heat build up.

I ground back all the welds where sheetmetal needs to be attached in the future and sprayed primer in the weld areas to minimise surface rust whilst the chassis is worked on in coming months prior to the final painting.

Chassis construction continues

A lot of measuring, cutting, bending and trimming on the weekend followed by a lot more welding.
Today some tack welding and assembling of the transmission tunnel (TT1), rear bulkhead (E1) and rear (C1) frames.

Chassis construction Begins

After collecting parts for the best part of 12 months, the chassis build has finally started!

The chassis is based on a FMS chassis, check the link for a cool 3D rendering http://www.formulamotorsport.net/Models/L7R/index.html#

A layout of the major sub frames



Lots of careful measuring, cutting and dressing of material before the first tack weld.
Bottom (A1) and top (B1) frames have been tacked as individual assemblies and then joined with all the interconnecting pieces.
Lot's of welding to come...