Protege5: Harder, not Smarter!

[Tamn]

Like the badges on opposite sides.....

(silly)

Whew, I've read your buildthread from the beginning and I was so disappointed to reach the end so far. Keep it up! I just bought an 02 P5 with a man trans to replace my 95 Firebird with a 5.7l which got 15-18 tank averages. I plan on ecomodding/hypermiling it and winding through some fun roads and maybe auto-x, so it seems like we have similar goals.

Subbed.

Very sweet yea I really wanna get out and try some auto cross but they just shut down my local place I was gonna run at this summer!!!

Ohhh later this week I'm attending a demo class on mold making at a fiberglass supply company near me. Should be awesome!

 

[Tamn]

I'm gonna pull off my glass panels off tomorrow and glass some more matting around the edges to get the gaps down. The hood is fairly bad all around and the hatch is factory except for the top corners.

I've been researching how to fix these gaps and I'm fairly confident I can obtain factory gaps all around every panel now. Nice thing about this plastidip, I'll just peel it off the edges and work it and spray it back on.

 

[JDM_Pro5]

I used nightshade spray tint on my taillights. First go around resulted in a black finished using 3-4 coats. I wet-sanded it all off and did it again. Used 2 coats to get a decent tint and then spray-cleared the tail lights

Stock

First attempt

Final product

 

[Tamn]

Tail lights came out nice

Yea I got the same stuff, but I'm still having trouble with the lexan...Idk it just doesn't like sticking to it.

 

[JDM_Pro5]

I'm not familiar with lexan at all. Is ot possible to scuff it up first with some steel wool. Try it out on scrap lexan that you cut in the window making process

 

[ajkulish]

and of course use water with the steel wool.

 

[JDM_Pro5]

Oh yeah, important. Thanks for the fix AJ

 

[ajkulish]

no problem sir

 

[Tamn]

So I took a very neat demo class on mold making, got some questions answered and got some more practice in. Good stuff, looking forward to my next piece.

I pulled the hatch off and cut the threaded brackets out of the glass. I cleaned it up a bit then glassed the stock hinges straight onto the hatch.

I was able to get it to sit very flush on top and the corners had the gap reduced drastically. The bracket was raising the hatch about 1/4th inch over the roof line.

And in other gas mileage news....
I've been driving around like a maniac this month on this tank of gas...many many WOT runs lasting 30+ seconds on very isolated back roads and I'm still going to get over 550 miles with this tank....I'm extremely pleased to say the least. Not a bit of eco driving technique used at all.

Pulling apart my turbo to rebuild it this week...also got a new fuel pump in the mail...figured it will go well with my injectors.

Still doing much research on the megasquirt set-up I'm planning on using.....confuses me but I'll figure it out I guess eventually.

 

[Tamn]

New toy for spraying fiberglass!

 

[Tamn]

Alright then...Guess I'm gonna make up some side skirts...Still trying to decide how low they can go and still be useful for daily driving.

Really excited to use my spray gun for the gelcoat and PVA, I also got a bunch of new air bubble rollers removers in various sizes.

After the skirts I'm gonna mold my stock bumper...then create a part of that, then I'm going to cut out the bottom half of the molded piece and add in a sloping rear diffuser and then create a mold from that part....and then finally produce the final piece off of that. Gonna be a LOT of work but from my measurements, the best under body areo gains will be made this way as putting the diffuser on the bottom of the bumper would give nearly no actual effects.

Random sidenote: been removing and reinstalling the corksport exhaust silencer in an effort to decide which gives the best mileage. I did a 4 hour drive yesterday and the last 2 hours, oh man that insane banshee wailing really got to me. Sounds great for small trips, etc, but hours upon hours really eats at your hearing. I couldn't hear a thing all day.

 

[JiggaBro]

i know what you mean. i LOVE the sound of my exhaust because it sounds deep and people think i drive a subaru
but after about a month i get tired of it (and highway drone sucks) so i made a silencer out of a soup can! 30 seconds to put on or off! i change it at least once a month.

and on a more important note.... when are you going to start making extra light weight parts for all of us!

 

[Tamn]

i know what you mean. i LOVE the sound of my exhaust because it sounds deep and people think i drive a subaru
but after about a month i get tired of it (and highway drone sucks) so i made a silencer out of a soup can! 30 seconds to put on or off! i change it at least once a month.

and on a more important note.... when are you going to start making extra light weight parts for all of us!

Haha totally man I put that silencer on and off like every month....it sounds so frikin awesome then I finally get tired of it and then...I'm just wishing for more awesome ear noise lol

Mmm, lightweight parts for you guys...probably when I actually think my quality is up to a good enough standard. I've been thinking of getting authorized vendor status here for awhile now, but I don't want to sell other people crappy parts. Every part I've made, it works...it looks decent enough, but once I've finished it, I can think of 4-5 things that I would do differently to make it better. Part of the problem has been lack of proper tools and part of it is I just honestly didn't know better at the time. I'm getting there...eventually (yawn)

(I have one more class at my community college before I can transfer to a real university where I'm going to be attempting to get into the automotive engineering program. Darn you last class!!!)

Got myself a nice angle grinder today for doing up the edges, now I don't have to struggle with my itty bitty dremel lol

I'm taking some more classes on vacuum bagging next week! Fun fun fun!

 

[livewire516]

Would it be possible to replace the roof panel with a fiberglass one? My Firebird has a glass t-top roof but for F-bodies (Firebirds and Camaros) that didn't have the option, the roof panel was composite. Also, the 2007 BMW M3 had a carbon fiber roof panel.

I imagine there are some structural components to the roof that you wouldn't want to meet with, but is the roof panel itself integral to the chassis? A fiberglass roof panel would really help lower the center of mass, plus I would imagine it would be on the easier side of panels to fabricate.

 

[Tamn]

Would it be possible to replace the roof panel with a fiberglass one? My Firebird has a glass t-top roof but for F-bodies (Firebirds and Camaros) that didn't have the option, the roof panel was composite. Also, the 2007 BMW M3 had a carbon fiber roof panel.

I imagine there are some structural components to the roof that you wouldn't want to meet with, but is the roof panel itself integral to the chassis? A fiberglass roof panel would really help lower the center of mass, plus I would imagine it would be on the easier side of panels to fabricate.

Well I know its a semi-common mod for honda's. I wouldn't do it unless the car was caged personally though

Anyways, never mind on the skirts for now. I've decided to build another hatch mold. This time I'm going to mold the outside like before, and then mold parts of the opposite side with flanges to bolt it to the other mold. (So a 4 piece mold) Basically I'm trying to mold it so that I can retain factory seal positions for the hatch. I want to make it so I can just bolt it right on a p5 with zero modifications for a perfect seal.

 

[Tamn]

Broke out my modeling clay! Did clay flange all the way around, then wax and pva....zomg my new spray gun is AWEEEESOME (compared to brushing)

Then I sprayed down my gel coat (also aweeeesome, but I need a bigger nozzle next time) Used my shiny depth gauge to make sure I got it the proper depth all around.

Laid down the first layer of glass as well, and my new anti bubble roller collection....AWESOMEEEEE

Don't have any pictures of the glass laid up it was literally so dark I couldn't see anymore as I frantically tried rolling air bubbles from that horrible gap above the license plate.
But it came out reeeeealllly good (just checked it out with my flashlight yo) I'll put down....probably 4 or 5 more layers of my thickest glass and then I'll glass in even more plywood above that.

First thing I'm figuring out...if your mold flex's at all...your parts will come out flexed as well....*cough cough my current hatch has to bend nearly 3 inches to fit in the factory lock*

This new mold is looking fantastic already...Gonna flange parts of the backside of the hatch so that it fits the factory seal and its gonna be looking sweet. Now I just have to scrape all that gelcoat off my wiper

 

[CR3 Motorsports]

Have you thought about using boating rope to assist in the mold strengths?

 

[Tamn]

Have you thought about using boating rope to assist in the mold strengths?

boating rope? No not really...but I just got donated a huge length of garden hose...which I have seen people use on fiberglass bends because it is fairly rigid and keeps a consistent shape for the glass to go over.

 

[Tamn]

Okies dokey...

Here we go take 2 on fiberglass hatch mold.


Did a 100+ car cruise to my local mountain this weekend.



















Also rebuilding the turbo and assembling the ECU at night when I can't work on the fiberglass anymore

Hatch mold has 1 3/4 oz layer to start, then 5 1.5 oz layers followed by the hose "reinforcement" and 25 thousands thickness on the gelcoat layers. BEEFY

Glassing the rear part of the mold tomorrow. That clay made a pretty nice flange...but it's a pain to clean up...a real pain...
My new angle grinder worked totally awesome for cutting though, much nicer than using a dremel.

 

[Tamn]

Put down 2 layers of my 3/4th oz glass, then 2 more layers of random extra bits.


Then I broke out the grinder and made a terrrrrrrrrible mess...*scratches arms*




My new shiny plastic wedges...more like half rubber half plastic, really nice, doesn't damage the molds. Those homemade wood ones I was using before...YUCK

Patience....is a virtue when trying to seperate molds...its terribly scary...in a fiberglassy kind of way. So many things can go wrong. You might have glued straight to your stock hatch in this case...after 4 days and like 30 hours of work and hundreds of dollars in materials.....and then you don't know how it's gonna look even if you do get it off...say your gel coat didn't go on thick enough...its pockmarked and unusable....or you could rip/snap your mold in half as you pry on it...Very nerve wracking at least for me.

For a horrible moment I thought I had ripped the back part of the mold in half as it let out a horrible shrieking sound resisting my efforts...then success!!



It came out....more beautiful then I could have every expected...absolutely flawless, no air bubbles I could find, no broken flanges, nice thick gelcoat all around...I was so excited I ran around my car twice.

This "air bubbly" looking stuff is not a ruined mold. It is dried PVA...dries into a sort of plastic food film wrap kind of stuff.

You can peel it off if you spray it on thick enough.

Like so...



Unexpected plus of the PVA...the left over clay on the flanges stuck to it and peeled off cleanly for the most part when I removed it. SCORE!

Takes an extremely long time to get that pva off anyways...I spent 2 hours with a razor blade grabbing edges and peeling the stuff off...exactly like you do when you get sunburned skin...=P
I'll try washing the rest of it off tomorrow. Then the most nervous part....splitting the front of the mold from the hatch....gonna give me nightmares tonight.
If the front is anything like this back piece...I would be EXTREMELY pleased. It would require...little or no sanding/bondo AT ALL and could be installed. *le gasp* I finally made a decent part mold.
Maybe I'll burn my old hatch one...piece of total junk I did not know what I was doing compared to this beauty.