Hi All
I am a 44 year old mechanical engineer and motor sport enthusiast in Port Elizabeth, South Africa and have been lurking on this site for a while, and have been encouraged by Johan to post some details of my project.
I am building up a self designed space frame two seater mid engine sports car from scratch. I will use it on the road for fun and possibly do some track racing, in our "classic" class out here. When I started my project (in early 2004) I did not have a particular body in mind, I just wanted to build a car. But you see some home built unique body cars that just don't look great, and I didn't want to do all this work (building a car) and not have it look good. So I decided to follow a car that is accepted as looking good to everyone, that is, the Lola T70 spyder.
So far I have a prototype chassis complete, all the running gear figured out, and had the engine running in the proto chassis. I posted some pictures below of what the (very rough) mock up chassis looked like, with several of the tube joints not properly made, some tube sizes still to be decided, and the joints only partially welded.
I am using a Rover engine and Audi AAZ 016 trans. I designed and made the exhausts, adaptor/mounting plate and flywheel, amongst other bits. The riveted on 1.6 mm ally side boxes more than doubled the chassis torsional rigidity from 2700 ftlb/Deg to 5700 ftlb/Deg. The chassis mass is 96 kg.
Once I have a body, I am going to build the car up to running the engine condition in the proto frame, then finally build the real frame and swap all the bits over. I do intend to simplify the front and rear of the frame once I have finalized the suspension. I will do this once I have the WOW (width over wheels) dimension correct, and for that I need the body. I am determined to get the body mounted and all the bits like radiator etc mounted as well as the suspension sorted out so I can design and make all the required brackets, front and rear subframes etc before making the REAL chassis. I also have had some ideas in the meantime on how to improve and simplify the chassis, so will have an opportunity to do this then.
I am doing it this way as I really don't want to rework or compromise anything in order to get something to fit once I (finally) build up the car for real. I want to have everything in an optimum place to avoid having any of those "You know, if I'd just put that chassis rail (or whatever) 30 mm further out/in/along, I could have got this part in easier, and that part would have looked/worked better" moments once I stand back and look at the almost complete car.
and this is me. The cheesy grin is because I had just started the motor for the first time.