was able to finish up the outside body work for the outside and get it into primer. This is really the first opportunity to really see all the angles and curves. It has turned out better than expected. I will start the fiberglass work on the inside next.
[This message has been edited by AWautoworks (edited 01-10-2018).]
I was able to do a test fit on my car to check clearances. There will have to be about a one inch notch out of the frunk but other than that everything clears quite nice.
Now that the hood is done its on to the mods to the rear. Our plan is to do a center exhaust system on a coupe bumper, shave the existing tail pipe holes and move the plate up to the tail lamp panel. The lights will have to be a custom glass panel with some built in leds.
My hope is that this turns out as good as it looks in my head
[This message has been edited by AWautoworks (edited 01-10-2018).]
Ok so its been awhile and not much progress has been made but I do want to drop a couple things here on the page. Thanks to Terry Ray on the facebook page our vision on the rear is now starting to take shape. This is not an exact match but pretty close. The hips on the rear of his vision aren't quite what we have but other than that is a pretty good vision of where we are headed with this build.
I also want to drop a little turbo noise here in the forum as well. Chris sent me this video of the car. It still needs some tuning but the sound is epic. Hope you enjoy Click me for Turbo noise !!!!!!
[This message has been edited by AWautoworks (edited 01-10-2018).]
Its been a while and not a lot of progress has been made, but I have receive the car back to my shop and I am able to hang the panels for proper fit to check gaps and finish body work. I was able to mount the quarter panel's rear bumper and lamps. once complete I will be able to do the finish body work before paint. The car still needs lowered down an inch and the wheel and tires are just for mock up purposes. I will be finishing up the spoiler to build it into the quarter and curve it down once I finish aligning the body. Its a slow process but it always pays off in the end
[This message has been edited by AWautoworks (edited 01-10-2018).]
The next step is to widen the fenders, my goal is to widen them at least an inch and a half. Here is the profile I started with.
My next step was to cut out the "flare" out of an existing fender. I had to cut around all of the perimeter and cut the back at the molding line to allow for the proper flex of the plastic. I lined up the wheel well and inserted temporary spacers, heated up the outside flare and set it over the top of the old fender. I have what I call Klincos or temporary rivets to hold it into place
I did have to trim the front bumper mount and re-attached it in a slightly different position as far as the lower I ended up cutting out a fender scoop just to make it easier to arch to the shape I needed.
Once I was able to ensure proper fitment It was time to remove the flare, prep for bonding and feather out the edges for smoother transition for body work. I prepped with a 50 grit rolac disc down to bare plastic to ensure a good bond between the two materials. I used a 2 part 3m epoxy 8223. It is a flexible panel bond and used a plastic prep before the panel bond was applied. Once bonded I placed my temporary rivets back into pace to keep pressure on the bonded area. Once dry overnight I was able to remove my rivets and my temporary spacers. I finished of the outer body work and filled the cavity with a pillar foam to keep vibration down.
We will be making fine tune adjustments with the wheels and tires and suspension to fit just a little bit better. now on to the rocker moldings and the passenger side fender.
Stay tuned for more.
[This message has been edited by AWautoworks (edited 01-10-2018).]
Made some progress today on the passenger side fender. same process as above with the driver side
I also made some good progress back on the Driver side with fitment of the rocker panel. I had to make 4 different cuts to allow for the bend needed to follow the flaring of the fender and quarter panel. I still need to do fine tune things on the front side. Once they are fitting good I will hot staple the rockers and then I will finish them out to fix the cuts made.
I will update with a step by step on the rockers once complete.
[This message has been edited by AWautoworks (edited 01-10-2018).]
SPOILER ALERT!!!! I have almost finished up with the spoiler tips. Its been a bit of a process. in the building of the tips, trying to get a good looking arch that goes with the body of the car and arch of the taillamp pocket.
I do have some finish work to do before primer but that's on step closer to completion
[This message has been edited by AWautoworks (edited 01-11-2018).]
everything has been primed and assembly is almost complete. I have to adjust some gaps and finish moldings and mirrors. I am letting it sit in primer for a few weeks or so to allow all the body work to finish shrinking if there is any. The car will be put back on a trailer and headed to SCHWA Motorsports for the correct wheels and suspension, and tuning. Everything is looking better than expected. There are some pin holes and such that will be addressed before paint.
[This message has been edited by AWautoworks (edited 01-11-2018).]
Thanks. We are all excited to see how it looks with some color. I would honestly say we achieved our goal of making the car look as close to stock as possible while achieving a total of 4 inches wider than stock stance.
there hasn't been any progress with body work. just waiting on everything to shrink down before we move to the final stages of the build. here are some more angles
[This message has been edited by AWautoworks (edited 01-11-2018).]
I absolutely love this! Keep the good work coming! I’m thankful every time a Fiero is saved vs scraped
Thanks. Its been a long process. We are waiting for the weather to break before we start back up on the finish work The paint has been purchased and mixed, but before we can see paint there is quite a bit of prepwork needed. We still have to block sand, reprime and repeat, finished off with a wet sand right before paint. Then we will tare it all down and ship it all over to the paint booth and spray some color
Lotus Lazer Blue is the color.
[This message has been edited by AWautoworks (edited 01-11-2018).]
I am in St. Joe tonight wish I had time to stop and see this beauty. What did you use to cut the fron fender up? I have read that heating up the material when cutting will close the cells so that nothing will bond to it.
I am in St. Joe tonight wish I had time to stop and see this beauty. What did you use to cut the fron fender up? I have read that heating up the material when cutting will close the cells so that nothing will bond to it.
when cutting the fender I used an air body saw. it was then ground down to a paper thin edge, and bonded with 3m two part professional adhesive. I dont recall the product number but its formulated for urethane repair. I have had failures due to the heating of materials. (not on a fiero but in the body shop itsself) and i wouldnt say that it closes the cells as much as it makes the urethane seep out its patrolium byproduct and cause adhesion problems.
The car is actually in independance right now with Chris. Hes tuning the engine and working on the suspension AKA messing up my body work. hahaha I do however have Marty's Car in the shop now. Its nothing special just an all over full dissasembly body resto.
Alex has been doing a good job of keeping everybody in the loop but I have been shaking the car down and doing my own work on the car to help get it ready for being able to drive back and forth between me and him for the body work.
I have had some hurtles on the car that I have been working, first and for most I have been having the joy of red hot exhaust manifolds and fireballs coming out the exhaust way larger than needed or wanted.
Please skip this paragraph if the stand alone computer stuff gets a little monotonous and time consuming this might get boring. So to start off when it comes to Microsquirt stand alone you end up needing to input a crank, and often cam, position input into the ecu to determine spark and fuel timing. Well ideally the stand alone computers use a Hall effect sensor, you provide it power and ground and it pulses the given power to the computer as a consistent input voltage. Most cars these days use a Variable Reluctance sensor, often called a VR sensor, and it uses the crank trigger wheel to produce a voltage in the sensor with the use of magnets, the problem with these sensors is the higher the rpm the higher the voltage tends to be. On a stock ECU matched to the car this isn't a problem at all, but on the stand alone often times the voltage gets too high and the signal gets lost. Now one last thing to keep in perspective is the VR sensors are just two wires, doesn't always tell which is positive and which is negative and can often be run either direction with the change of some settings. Well given all that background I ended up with a setting off and the wires flipped and once that was sorted I was loosing tach signal at higher rpms, due to the high voltage. So after adding a resistor inline, which burns off some of the voltage from the sensor, I was back in business with a motor revving to 6k+ and much less cutting out.
You can skip this paragraph too, but it isn't as stand alone heavy, and more just engine technical heavy The next challenge I was having was the glowing red manifolds, as the fiero community is well aware of red hot manifolds is simple put due to high exhaust gas temperatures. For the stock 2.8 this is most commonly found from cracked manifolds sucking in air and making a lean mix in the manifold and there for hot exhaust. Intake manifold leaks can cause this two, but I was able to rule both of them out with some checking, so I had to dig farther. One thing is isn't often mentioned with the Designs One turbo kit, is the that the turbo is too small, you hear it when people talk about putting it on the 3.4, but truthfully its too small for the 2.8 too, especially if anything has been done to the motor, like high flowing aluminum heads and intake So we get back to when I was getting red hot manifolds, after about 5min on the highway at 70mph my manifolds were glowing and glowing quite brightly, including the whole turbine housing and the beginning of the downpipe. Well long story a bit shorter, one thing you always need to do on a stand alone car and I hadn't done since the car was running was confirm ignition timing, well I was retarded by 3.5 degrees, its a simple process of setting the engine to run at a static 10 degrees of ignition timing and checking to see how far off you were, I was running 6.5 degrees, so was off the whole time. So add that to the fact that the turbo is so small that 70mph I was spooling the turbo to almost 0 vacuum just cruising, well this caused the engine to go into the the timing of 12 degrees for under boost and richening up, well compound that with 3.5 degrees off your down to 8.5 degrees of spark timing, very low for this motor, and in turn red hot manifolds. After fixing these issues I had it running pretty nicely, but sadly not before I had taken a drastic step and changed the turbo to a larger one I found locally.
Now for the turbo conversion build, we will start with a few things, and most of them are related to my specific install, but hopefully it can be useful information for somebody else considering a 3x00 swap. First is the cast manifolds that match the motor are much larger sized than the fiero manifolds port wise, and the 2.8 or gen 2 manifolds both will not fit the gen 3 heads, the port on them is bigger than the manifold itself. So I went ahead on my build and converted the car from the fiero manifolds and cross over to the 2.8 gen2 aluminum head manifolds and cross over, eliminating the down pipe flange and egr port hole. Now for the new turbo, I got a JDM subaru legacy turbo, its a twin scroll turbo for a 150hp 2.0l 4 cylinder, so a little small still, but the same brand as my turbo that was on the car so lots swap over, but I did have to build a new crossover pipe and downpipe, and change my charge piping a bit.
Here is the crossover mock up with the turbo flange:
And here are a couple pictures of the turbo in place:
I was able to reuse a lot of the piece from last turbo setup on the charge piping and intercooler and had the set up going fairly quickly:
So as of right now the car has been getting tuned and tweaked and the turbo set up is doing quite well, boost quite nicely and makes awesome noises, as the video alex posted shows. Now the next step that is causing issues is I am experiencing boost creep due to the undersized turbo, running a 2.8l on a turbo meant for a 2.0 isn't ideal, but I wasn't planning large boost levels and the turbo can flow 400hp worth of flow, so Im not worried. I will be pulling the turbo to port the exhaust manifold and waste gate ports to help reduce the creep, right now I hit 6psi by about 1500-1800rpms and by 4000rpms I start gaining a pound of boost every few hundred rpms until I hit 11-12psi and I let off before it gets out of hand
So hopefully you guys enjoyed the antics Ive been through, it can get frustrating at times, but as somebody who has daily driven fieros for year and then been out of them for years I am really enjoying my time back in one!
Not to get off Topic but while the car is back at SCHWA Motorsports with the owner, I moved on to Marty's car. It is an 86 SE converted to GT, It obtained some damage from a parking lot accident. With the Insurance Check he brought the car to me for an overall body restoration. I did a Full Panel off like I do with everything that comes in the shop. I thought the car was in decent shape when it came in but looks can be deceiving.
Once I Got it disassembled I started in hard and heavy on the prepwork and this is what I uncovered Looking at this picture this is what I can only assume what happened. The original paint started to chicken scratch and delaminate. The owner who apparently had very minimal to no experience decided to just buzz and prime. Low and behold it came through the paint. Rinse and repeat, and repeat. Very poor workmanship in my opinion. Me being the perfectionist that I am I knew that I had to take all the existing material down to at least OE sealer. Just a side note Covering the problem will not fix it :/. I then Primed and blocked. Repeated a few troubling areas that popped up after blocking 320 Dry block then up to 600 wet block for a pristine Finish And now for the fun part I am using all GM colors, starburst orange from the corvette and a Charcoal with a bronze Metallic. I laid out my stripes and painting the side trim the charcoal.
Still in the process of putting it together but its looking great so far.
[This message has been edited by AWautoworks (edited 02-05-2018).]
Do you have a photo of the other side of the hood? (inside)
quote
Originally posted by AWautoworks:
Welcome to Page 2 of the Build!
was able to finish up the outside body work for the outside and get it into primer. This is really the first opportunity to really see all the angles and curves. It has turned out better than expected. I will start the fiberglass work on the inside next.
Do you have a photo of the other side of the hood? (inside)
I will Get some for you when the car comes back to my shop in a few weeks. Its not really pretty at the moment anyways. I haven't done any glass work to the underside at all to close it out.
I need to get some opinions on the inner sails. The questions is should i paint the inner sails orange to match? I will be painting the vents the Iridum Gray Metallic as well so keep that in mind
Just a little update on the Orange job in the shop rightn now.
Just pulled it out for a better view in the sun. please mind the swirl marks and the dirty windshield im not quite done polishing yet but everything is looking great so far
I just wanted to compliment you on your work and ideas. Nice work!
I appreciate the compliment, especially coming from someone in the Fiero world with the history that you have. Your old car is my desktop background at work. Thank you
[This message has been edited by AWautoworks (edited 03-08-2018).]
Was able to refinish some moldings over the weekend for Marty's Orange Crush. the little things are comming together. smoothed the door handles and painted the small details in the Scoop
Any updates on the widebody? I'm chomping at the bit to see how this thing turns out.
I need to get Chris to update the engine work, but ill update you as much as I can. For anyone who knows him he is the most indecisive person you will ever meet. On that note he had a lifter collapse in the 2.8 so instead of just opening it up and replacing the valve terrain he fumbled through a few different options one week it was 3500, the next it was sapping the other 2.8 he has on the side. So now he has finally started work on the 3400 engine. Same Turbo set up just basically swapping for larger displacement and better airflow. I will get him to update his progress on the engine build.
On the plus side I was able to finish up Marty's car while I am patiently waiting Chris, It turned out killer.
Both of these beauties will be at the 35th anniversary show as well as the 15th annual Fiero Fun Fest in Kansas City for anyone wanting to see them in person
Well it has been a few months since I have had the car at my shop. It finally made its way back to me yesterday. now the preperation has begun to do all the finishing work. The original goal was to have it done by the 35th but with the car back to me 2 weeks before the show I dont expect that to happen. We will have it there for everyone to look at but it will not be a completed work. I will start with some updated photos tomorrow.
So we get back to when I was getting red hot manifolds, after about 5min on the highway at 70mph my manifolds were glowing and glowing quite brightly, including the whole turbine housing and the beginning of the downpipe. Well long story a bit shorter, one thing you always need to do on a stand alone car and I hadn't done since the car was running was confirm ignition timing, well I was retarded by 3.5 degrees, its a simple process of setting the engine to run at a static 10 degrees of ignition timing and checking to see how far off you were, I was running 6.5 degrees, so was off the whole time. So add that to the fact that the turbo is so small that 70mph I was spooling the turbo to almost 0 vacuum just cruising, well this caused the engine to go into the the timing of 12 degrees for under boost and richening up, well compound that with 3.5 degrees off your down to 8.5 degrees of spark timing, very low for this motor, and in turn red hot manifolds. After fixing these issues I had it running pretty nicely, but sadly not before I had taken a drastic step and changed the turbo to a larger one I found locally.
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