Quote:
Originally Posted by freebeard
Congratulations! ....and welcome.
Zombie threads are Okay, perusing page 1 I see the VW rat rod I'd asked about. I'm making payments on an 1990 XFi so this is relevant to my current interest.
Do you have plans for it? How does it drive? Noise, harshness, vibration?
|
I have plans ranging from reasonable to ambitious to silly.
Reasonable
I’ve already put a rear view camera and replaced the metro mirrors with different ones. I’m going to remove those once I get side view cameras together, and use those instead.
I need to make a real interior. I love the mad max meets doc brown aesthetic it has right now, but I want to make this thing look like a spaceship on the inside as well as outside. Thin aluminum dashboard, brushed and anodized, full width of the car, using bent and alumawelded aluminum tube space frame. Whole thing should weigh less than 20lbs. I’m going to use the metro gauges but remounted in my own cluster, which I’ll be styling after 80s and 90s digital dashboards. Think a 1970s hifi stereo system mixed with Knight Rider.
Also on this dash I will have full instrumentation. You might see the various thermometers and voltmeters in the interior now. The voltmeters are directly connected to the fuel injectors and o2 sensor. This is awesome but also silly. I will take all this information, read by multiple microcontrollers, and feed it to an Atomic Pi (a raspberry pi on steroids basically) for datalogging and instrumentation. I’ll also use the atomic pi to run a Carplay server for my phone.
New paint: I had Gene sign the car. It will be clearcoated where he signed it ASAP, and that spot will always be costed aluminum. I don’t want to take credit for this whole car, just my upgrades. Anyways, I’m not settled on a paint scheme yet. I was thinking burgundy where it’s blue now with cream pinstripes perhaps. Something a bit 40s. Yeah I’m mixing eras but so what it’s my car.
Aero: this car has very good aerodynamics, but they could be even better. The mirrors are gonna be gone, replaced by barely there cameras. The rain gutters riveted on above the doors were a useful in the moment fix, but they’re Atrocious aero. I’ll need to do something else for rain, maybe a dimple gutter instead. Full front wheel skirts that open when steering are on the ambitious side but I’d like to do it. The whole front end of the car isn’t actually that aerodynamically clean. I’m going to reshape the whole front to be more blunt, and while I’m at it I’m blocking off the grill. I’ll be relocating the radiator and AC condenser to the belly of the car, where they will both create less drag and get more airflow. Also vortex generators at the very back of the car to help clean up the sharp edge.
Ambitious
To be continued , I just typed all this on my PHONE.