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My Custom Engine Bay.

22K views 119 replies 15 participants last post by  GK27V6 
#1 · (Edited)
A lot of you probably have come across my Exterior Project, which I have effectively completed (well not entirely) and not yet unveiled to the internet- sorry guys; there's a good reason for it.

In Post #231 I wrote:

"After this exterior project, I do have plans for a shaved and partially-tucked engine bay anyway, so what I thought I'd do is lay the adhesive over the area, to act as a filler, and also smooth out other details. For example, I ground off some welded-in nuts which were intended to hold the washer reservoir and ABS module..."

Well I have been working on just that (and more haha).


Let's get started.

First, I am extremely grateful that I have been blessed with the opportunity to do this. I have a friend who's in the process of opening a car shop and has let me use the space to work on my car in my spare time. That said I have been working on the project on my own and expect it to stay that way. That is, I don't think my project will be receiving any additional or professional help from others.

Before this project, in October 2018 something went horribly wrong with my steering. Thankfully it was while I was in a parking lot. In short: it would steer to the left way too much, and to the right not enough (and even that wouldn't be consistent). I assumed the steering rack failed, which I expected to fail next on my car, and as such I had already bought a replacement steering rack ahead of time. So part of this project will involve investigating what happened and overgo its repair. I figure at this point I could as well do a full power steering delete, and it'd be best to replace the timing belt as well. over the 2018-19 winter I had the poor thing parked outside. Here we are at the end of March 2019 when I had it towed over:



Absolutely disgusting. The worst of it is not seen in the photo. This is what happens after several years of neglect + shortening CAI to prevent hydrolock (due to not having fender liners) + throwing and zip-tying things in the engine bay quick to drive the car again upon completion of previous exterior project lol (I can explain all of that). There is many years' worth of road salt, dirt, grease & oil all over the place.

Poor headers :( I will put in the effort to restore these.


Also, if you didn't catch it: one stud is missing - which was actually a bolt since I stripped the threads on the headers install so instead installed a longer bolt.

More on missing bolts later...

I don't like to start the thread off like this as a neglegence of care is not how I treat things; it's not who I am. So let's fix that.





More grossness here:


That is a coating of dirt stuck in place. Here it is cleaned up with some brake cleaner:


This side, while also dirty, is black because when I was 20 years old I thought it was a neat idea to paint whatever of the engine bay that I could until eventually I'd have it all black. lol, I was a kid...:


As for the steering rack. Well, it could have an internal issue (likely does), but it seems my issue was really mostly a simple matter of two out of four bolts having gone missing:


Also notice how disgusting this area is lol. More on that later when we get to the subframe work haha.
Now you might wonder: how do two bolts go missing? I have a guess as to why: solid motor mounts. I have them installed front & rear. Never in the ownership of my car had the steering rack been removed, or had its bolts loosened for any reason (heck, even the subframe has never been fully removed), so I cannot think of any other reason than extra and particular vibration frequencies causing them to loosen. The steering rack & motor mounts are all attached to the subframe after all. Anyway, between the steering rack having sported over a third of a million kilometers of use, having ripped boots, and having been in a collision it is worthwhile to simply replace the rack. Looking forward to doing that.


With the engine & steering investigation out of the way it's time to get onto the fun stuff 8)

Time to cut some profiles with cardboard:




Part of my project here involves closing up the engine bay (including the underside- more on that later) so that dirt can virtually no longer get into it ever again, ensuring it remains always clean. I have a few things in mind to help the aerodynamics as well :p That is, I am going to angle the radiator and vent the hood.
 
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#3 ·
The steering issue could have been a poor alignment job as well. Most shops don't take the time to ensure the rack is in the neutral position before doing the alignment. :(

Holy crap that was some dirt! lol Almost like a supermodel that's hot on the outside but rot on the inside.. ;)

One thing that concerns me with all this engine bay tucking going on is how it could compromise the crash structure. Having been in a head on collision myself I can attest to the effectiveness of Hyundai's design. Welding plates over crumble zones could negate any benefits they give in a crash. Just something to think about. There's a reason most tucked and shaved cars are tailored to shows.. ;)
 
#6 ·
Yeah that's a fair point to consider. But in my case I am sure a major contributing factor is my negligence of the power steering system. About 4 or 5 years ago the power steering fluid leaked out somewhere (never checked where) and left it that way because basically I liked it better without power steering. Effectively ran the steering with virtually no fluid; air in system among lots of dirt likely. I am sure to some degree the rack experienced heat that it wasn't designed for (or at least for any prolonged period of time). Thing is during this period I had already bought my replacement rack so I didn't care for it failing.

lol, wait until you see my next post for dirt haha...

Yes, I understand. This project actually has experienced zero welding for the clean engine bay design. I had something else in mind that I believe will be the best of both worlds, which I will demonstrate in the next post. I don't like the idea of a car being for "show only" - I like to challenge myself and get that "show" level but have the car still be drive-able in daily driving conditions. This approach sure takes a massive more amount of thought & design, but I like that sort of thing haha. This is something I will demonstrate with this project, you'll see :p
 
#7 ·
So, one massive advantage of working in a shop is that I have access to a sand blaster :p

Here's the brake booster. Outright filthy.


and here it is blasted:

Will be followed up with paint later.

Next it was time to take off the subframe:


Look a little closer at it:


I honestly cannot describe how much dirt there was on this thing. I should have weighed it before and after (oh yeah there's a scale at the shop here too so I have been weighing things as I went along haha). I have done several things for weight reduction on this car such as AC delete, CF hood, etc., but I think cleaning the engine bay shed off a good deal of pounds as well just from the sheer amount of crap stuffed in it.

Now back to the bread and butter. I want to clean things up generally as much as I can, so one thing I ended up doing after some debate back and forth in my head was to relocate where the brake lines go through. These brake lines will effectively be hidden because I am creating a panel that goes against the firewall which will hide the lines behind it, among other things such as wires. That's what the cardboard profiles were for in my last post. More on that in a later post.



Next, it was time to start grinding:


Followed by working with a steel wire wheel:


Now for the fun stuff: body panel adhesive.


I wanted to avoid using solely body filler to avoid cracking considering the type of forces that the chassis experiences. I figure the adhesive will really help to smooth things out, but also have just enough of a structural rigidity component that it won't crack, yet also not compromise crash structure in the area (compare to welding which would alter the original chassis structure rigidity drastically).

After lots of sanding and primer I could then start to lay body filler:


At one point, while looking at the engine bay I realized this area in front of the strut is not symmetrical with the driver's side. So, I went ahead and made some cuts, adjusted the sheet metal, and adhered it back together. Not 100% symmetrical with the driver's side, but at least now it's not immediately obviously different. I know the reason for why the surface is that way to to hold one part of the motor mount, but I have modified that mount as will be seen.



Anyway, more filler and sanding:


Eventually I could work on making a consistent radius across intersecting surfaces:
 
#9 ·
I am not sure what I think of all this. I am sure it will look better. I too can attest to the crunch points and design into the car by the manufacturer. I have wrecked two tibb's, and they both folded i the same spot and were almost completely symmetric in bending, one on the right and other on the left.
 
#10 ·
Took me a bit longer than I thought to get back into posting here. But now that Christmas is approaching I have some free time.
To make up for the delay let's get straight into the fun stuff :p

First, what the heck is my subframe doing on top of this carbon fiber hood? Or why did I place that hood against the bumper? Stay tuned :p




Next: reservoirs.
I wanted to clean up this engine bay both literally and by design. So, I thought I would replace & relocate some reservoirs. First up is the coolant overflow. Figured it would go around here:


Now this idea for the windshield fluid reservoir I had many years ago. I recall thinking to place it here as far back as 2012. Thankful I can finally do that. Never thought I'd get excited over a windshield fluid reservoir:

I will be modifying the cowl and/or surrounding area of course. This is currently a low priority for my project so no further development on it for now.


Let's switch back to this carbon fiber hood situation. It's not for a Tib obviously, it's for a ~2012 Optima. That part doesn't really matter. What matters is that I got it for about ~$100 lol and will be making good use of it as it will now become obvious what's happening here:





You saw that correctly. It's closing up the underside of the engine bay. I have acquired an extra set of hood hinges and hood latches. I will install those so that I can hinge it open quickly for say doing an oil change. But I will also design this system so that I can just slide off the hood completely in case that's needed. Initially I was going to make the hinge rotation so that it opens at the front of the car (much like the normal hood but obviously upside-down) but then I realized it may be a safer solution to reverse that: i.e. put the hinges at the front of the car and the latches by the firewall. So excuse the next set of photos where you may see hood latch studs (whatever they're called) at the front of the subframe.

The under-hood doesn't stop there btw. It's not just a means to close off the engine bay, though that would be its primary purpose as this (1) keeps the engine bay clean (remember: I will be daily driving this project car - just as I always have, which is effectively the point of this car), and (2) aids aerodynamics massively. Now of course simply closing off the front portion of the car is not enough. Some of you may be aware or recall in another thread where I demonstrated I have picked up an RD2 CF hood to act as a rear diffuser. I still have that, and will be installing it at the same time. This leaves only the middle portion of the car to be filled in with virtually any suitable material. In fact last year I already picked up two sheets of Alupanel to go there, but I left those in my work building's parking garage which some of you know got heavily flooded and those panels have since disappeared. I sketched out various ideas on the overall design for this:


Anyway, one of the other reasons why I think it may make more sense to have the under-hood open in the reverse arrangement is because of the downforce it will experience. Check this out:
So, I cut the RD2's hood about 2/3 of the way across, leaving me with 1/3 of it. I knew back then (in 2015 lol) that this remaining third would be useful for something. So here it is:



I had to crop a lot out of those photos since they were taken fairly recently and I didn't want to spoil the rest of my progress :p And, I haven't cut the panel to fit yet so currently it won't fit into position but I think you get the idea: it's going to line up with the front of the under-hood, and create a "point" underneath the bumper cover and be angled upward. So it is effectively a front spoiler. But it will also cleanly direct air to the radiator (remember: I will also be creating a giant extractor on the hood to re-direct this airflow out, efficiently). The little "scoop" sections (i.e the raised surface portion leading to the RD2's headlights) will also serve a function as you will see later :p I haven't decided yet to where I will be mounting it, but it is possible the downforce load may be transferred from it to the under-hood and therefore this region must be adequately reinforced.
 
#11 ·
Now I mentioned airflow to the radiator. And those of you who know the Tiburon well enough will wonder how I'm gonna make that front spoiler work when you know the lower radiator support bar goes there (not to mention the radiator itself). Well, I planned this out from the beginning: I wanted to angle the radiator as much as I could, which ultimately meant securing it to the subframe. This also eliminates the lower rad support bar (more on that later). After a lot of experimenting I have found the position that will work:



This meant cutting off the radiator brackets from the support bar:



And mounting them somewhere approximately here on the subframe:



That will be developed later, as at this point it came time to work on closing up the engine bay. You will recall the cardboard profiles in my first post in this thread, so here we continue with that:


The plan was to create fiberglass profiles that would be permanently bonded to the subframe. This is for various reasons: First, I feel this design makes the most sense to close the engine bay. Consider for example if I'd come into the situation of needing to drop the subframe or something - I didn't necessarily want to add any additional steps to that process (or at least minimize them). Second, this cleans up the design of the subframe, therefore enhancing the clean engine bay design more so. And finally, I went with fiberglass because I think it makes more sense to use an insulating-type of material here, and FG is cheap and can easily be adapted to accommodate more curved surfaces if need be. Additionally, at this point I still have zero experience with welding (but hoping to learn this over the next year) and I know from experience that the 3M adhesive will adequately bond fiberglass to steel. I understand there may be a concern of fiberglass/filler cracking here considering the subframe holds a massive weight that gets shifted and jerked around during the vehicle's motion, thereby transferring all sorts of forces in all sorts of directions. Well, this is an experiment after all so let's find out if and where it cracks once this thing is back on the road. If it does crack, then I will find out why and adjust the design accordingly. This is all part of the learning process that I love.



You can see here I have profiles to be adhered to the subframe, but there is also one panel that goes over the firewall. This will be finished in carbon fiber and as such I refer to it as the carbon wall. The purpose of the carbon wall is to hide a ton of stuff, mostly brake lines and wires.



After profiles were cut it was time to add the adhesive. As you can see this will be a fairly nice and flat surface, where only the sway bar mounting section would be exposed (but even that area is cleaned up). Also note the vertical carbon fiber piece on the subframe. This is a thicker, stronger piece (that I cut off from the excess of the Optima's hood lol) for which the firewall's carbon wall will slip in behind to. Again, I wanted to keep things relatively simple for installation or disassembly, so I didn't want the carbon wall part of the subframe.


It took quite a bit of time to design these profiles so that all parts (steering rack, sway bar, drive axles) can still be installed & in place without any significant issues added.


This turned out to be a more significant matter for the carbon wall, having to deal with heater core hoses, clutch slave cylinder, brake booster, and the steering system as well.
 
#12 ·
Thanks dude....nice posts.....

Thoughts....(yes, Debbie downer....)..,,,

Think of service, like crank bolt through PS (US) front wheel well.
Cheap airflow is tape, yarn tufts, another car/video camera. Take it from someone that works on aircraft. Looking good may not be good....think, then verify.....

Thanks again for your posts, great to see a different slant on Tib things.....
 
#14 ·
haha, yes, while working on all these aero-related projects I always ask myself if I am truly convinced if the modifications will in fact aid aerodynamics, or possibly make things worse. For this reason I tried my best to at the very least not make these modifications ugly or heavier than they need to be. I know my fender flares (particularly the rear ones) are most likely really screwing things up. But I like them enough that I am ok with that haha :p ...and it's also one of the reasons why I have extractors on the rear bumper. Which, again, I have to ask myself: are those extractors really decreasing pressure in the wheelwell area? Are they really helping with air flow detachment on the rear side of the vehicle? At some point I do wish to run some tests and see what I can find out, whether that be with yarn tufts or other methods. I will get there.
 
#13 ·
GK, your engine bay project is pretty sweet. kinda wish i had the patience to work through stuff like this. the underbody panel is a pretty sweet idea. the curve is actually pretty advantageous; if you decide to put some fiberglass strakes onto it to close the underside-to-ground distance and channel air through a mild venturi, you could definitely generate some Downforce there. the RD hood as a diffuser or venturi feeder is also a pretty great idea. (might as well do something for the rear in regards to a venturi and diffuser with all this stuff up front. can't have the tib skip leg day.) any plans for a radiator shroud from the bumper to your rad?

props, and best of luck.
 
#15 ·
Thank you good sir, I appreciate your comments.
Yeah I gotta admit the patience does run out eventually. I've been working on this stuff for over seven months and then finally in November I took a break. Haven't worked it since. But I have been mentally preparing myself over this last week just now to get back into it. Re-starting this week actually. I want it on the road for spring lol.


I have considered strakes. Here is what I have concluded to pursue if I end up doing strakes: They will be active; they will deploy on my command. Reason being that I have a particular aesthetic in mind for my car where more "aggressive" visual elements are to be hidden or at the very least only visible when needed. For this reason I won't have front canards for example (and in my research have found that their benefits are somewhat specific and/or possibly insignificant). Though I may in a sense create "internal" canards - think if air could flow in from the fog light bezel area and then gently be directed upwards in front / into the wheelwell (but also directed away from the tire as much as possible). I likely will pursue such a design as part of this project. Later projects could include a retractable rear wing that will be completely hidden when not retracted.

As for radiator shroud - yes. I don't have that in my last post but I have half of that done. At least on the side closest to engine is done i.e. sealed. On the front side I will be making use of that 1/3 of the RD's hood along with some vertical profiles to completely close off the FL front bumper's air dam to direct all air to the radiator. What's exciting here is that the RD hood portion will be angled, meaning it (hopefully) acts as a front spoiler - it will start from slightly below the front bumper lip and make its way up to the top of the subframe. Again, sort of an "internal" feature so to speak, I enjoy keeping these components tucked in for some reason. While we are on the topic of radiator shroud: I have recently put my hood back on (loosely) to check just what kind of an extractor I could make on the hood to direct the air out from the radiator. I was particularly concerned about the oil cap's proximity to the underside of the hood but upon checking its distance it actually isn't that bad. Hopefully I can make some progress on that soon.
 
#16 ·
I will say that this sounds great.
retractable strakes may not be viable. that's a lot of complexity for very little gain on a hinged panel. it's not like people will see the underside strakes on a lowered car like this.
the RD hood has the headlight curve larger in front than in back, which means it's likely to direct air downwards unless the whole panel gets angled down. you may want to also consider air curtains. taking frontal air, like where the fog light is, and funneling it to a narrow slit along the front of the wheel well (rear edge of the bumper where it forms the front of the wheel arch) to generate a high velocity curtain of air to prevent oncoming air from interacting with the front wheel. it can reduce drag.

i forgot if your hood had a vent in it.

how about functional venting gills?

PS. also, it's good to be back online again. i've beenhaving the time of my life trying to handle restoring my tib to mint while juggling a more serious ZZW30 widebody buildup
 
#17 ·
I will say that this sounds great.
retractable strakes may not be viable. that's a lot of complexity for very little gain on a hinged panel. it's not like people will see the underside strakes on a lowered car like this.
I realized we may have confused two items possibly. Are we talking about the vertical strakes that are behind the rear axle? As long as they'd be straight I'd make them retractable. But you are right, it may be hard to see them to really justify that. I guess I will find out when the time comes.

the RD hood has the headlight curve larger in front than in back, which means it's likely to direct air downwards unless the whole panel gets angled down.
The RD hood will be facing backwards btw - not sure I made that clear anywhere. How it is sits is that it will be overall on an inclination, just like a real diffuser. What makes the RD hood so excellent in this application is that the raised sections for the headlights end up pocketing the mufflers, so I end up getting the maximum incline wherever possible. Fits great! And speaking of CF hoods fitting great underneath the car.. (lol).. last night I finally had the chance to better position the Optima hood under the engine bay because I recently installed the drive axles / suspension / (temporary) wheels. Oh man, I can't believe how great this hood fits under there. I thought I had taken sufficient photos but apparently not upon checking just now lol.. I'll be back at the shop again soon to keep working on that.

you may want to also consider air curtains. taking frontal air, like where the fog light is, and funneling it to a narrow slit along the front of the wheel well (rear edge of the bumper where it forms the front of the wheel arch) to generate a high velocity curtain of air to prevent oncoming air from interacting with the front wheel. it can reduce drag.
Yep, I have been designing for those. In fact I planned on making those many years ago and even in last year's body kit project I had set up the extractor portions into the front bumper already. I have in this time found out that I made those portions way too big lol so I will make adjustments there. This year I will be modifying my front bumper to allow in air from beside the fog lights.


i forgot if your hood had a vent in it.
It doesn't yet. But it will.

how about functional venting gills?
Way ahead of you :p I cut those open along with my body kit project. I haven't had time since then to install (or rather create) any fender liners lol so it's very open behind the fenders. Which is not ideal I know, so I will be creating custom fender liners along with channels that will direct air pressure out through the gills.

PS. also, it's good to be back online again. i've beenhaving the time of my life trying to handle restoring my tib to mint while juggling a more serious ZZW30 widebody buildup
Yeah it's pretty hit or miss coming here, but somehow prefer it over FB groups. and lol wait so are you installing the widebody on your Tib or another car? Not familiar with "ZZW30"
 
#22 ·
Ey there, any new progress?
 
#23 ·
Appreciate you checking in.

Yes, lots. I spent an entire month on my hood now. I am almost done with the hood. I am very happy with it currently, about 90% done so give it about another week. I'll do my best to post updates then.

Also been sourcing the last of parts I need. Braided hoses came in, hooray, but now I will need a 190LPH fuel pump. Been searching the last few days. The beloved Bosch is discontinued :/
 
#24 ·
nooooo not the bosch!

i'm excited to see how it all looks and your driving impressions. with all those mods, the drive will definitely feel different whether intentional or not.
 
#26 · (Edited)
Oh man, I knew I was behind on updating build progress here but checking it now... oops. Trust me I've been meaning to upload photos and post since months ago but I've been occupied with a lot - work (which is a startup), friends, church, planting a new church which is also like a startup, oh and working on the car lol. It does take several hours to post these updates so it's kind of a commitment lol, but especially with the recent interest from people I am now more motivated for this one. The work I have shown you so far is what took place from March through June 2019. I'll commit some extra time to get everyone up to speed now on what I have done up to the rest of 2019. 2020 so far has been mostly just the hood - when I post it, you'll see why that's taking my 20x longer than I thought it would.

Now, from where we left off, the subframe. Not much to it, just finished it up and painted it black.



It's cut the way it is on the sides because of driveshafts, steering rack and sway bar passing through, so those upper sections will be part of the frame, not subrame. Also if you noticed the one rather large section cut out on the driver's side that's because the fuse box is going there:


Why black? As you know my engine bay is a dark grey metallic, so why the change? Well my thought here was that I wanted to create a stronger contrast, or perhaps a stronger visual hierarchy for the engine, which will be painted silver. We can call the textured grey like "75% black" and the subframe "100%" black - let's not forget the bottom of the engine bay will be closed as well, which will be black as well, but will also have a shadow case onto it so let's call that "110% black" lmao. So this has somewhat of a gradient effect so that the attention is more on the engine, and not on parts that are not as interesting such as the subframe lol. You will see throughout the painting process I made a lot of little decisions like this: some items I want attention drawn to, some I do not - and that has to all work visually in balance. I don't seem to have a photo of it black on its own so here it is installed:


Also have the carbon wall finished here in these pictures. I will say it's not great, and for next time thought of a way to make this wall cleaner, lighter, as well faster to produce. At some point I will redo it but it'll do for this year.


I ordered various profile rubber strips. So the rear-top of the subframe has one, as does the perimeter of the carbon wall:


I hate to be so all over the place, but that was kind of the nature of this project. So while doing body-type of work on that subframe I've also been working with the engine. First, I had to clean it. Then, it was time for the timing belt change. Which seemingly was a close call, you'll see. Have I ever mentioned how gross this engine bay was?


Gross. ^fun fact: you can see in the little spot that the transmission was actually painted silver (did so in 2012 when I had to replace it and have it rebuilt).

Cleaning it with brake cleaner took several nights lol. There probably was a better product to use, but oh well. Went over it with sandpaper eventually.


You can see the difference here:


Cleaned up, ready for sanding & paint:



Back to that in a minute.

Now the timing belt:

You can see in the picture that it's barely on (but I did poke around with it, so it probably wasn't quite as severe on shown here - still, shouldn't be able to do that). Additionally the timing mark was off, but granted not by that much - seems to be within line of the guide of being off by a tooth is ok for these engines. There was a lot of play in the belt. I think I dodged a bullet here, granted it was overdue for a change since years. That belt was installed way back in early 2010. I have put 140000KM on it. 40k, 4 years overdue, I know. At least it wasn't cracked or frayed, but seemingly stretched. I have never changed a timing belt before, it wasn't so bad. I was of course being careful, read the threads here on NT, and followed the DIY.

INTERMISSION:
Ok so at this point we've been seeing the engine head towards paint - a big deal, something I've dreamed of this whole time I've owned my car, which is now over ten years. So, to build on the never-ending issue affecting millions of car enthusiasts worldwide:



In the process of cleaning my engine I GOT MY 10MM SOCKET BACK!!! And bonus: the extension. I dropped that in the "V" of my engine in 2012. It's been there for seven years. Was lost for seven years and got it back :')

Now back to regular scheduled programming:



Aww yeah.

I'm gonna leave it there for now - will hopefully make a another post or two today. I've only brought you up to about July/August 2019 anyway.
 
#27 ·
oof that 10mm lost for 7 years.

also, that's gonna look great. though question: why didn't you go for a wire brushing of the surfaces with a drill and wire brush attachment? it seemed that the surface wasn't quite 100%, but i could be wrong.

Carbon firewall cover: are you going to smooth it with 600 grit and give it some 2k canned clearcoat (catalyzed polyurethane)? That would make it quite nice, just an idea.

Also: what type of paint did you use on the engine? and if you used primer also, what type of primer?
 
#28 ·
oof that 10mm lost for 7 years.

also, that's gonna look great. though question: why didn't you go for a wire brushing of the surfaces with a drill and wire brush attachment? it seemed that the surface wasn't quite 100%, but i could be wrong.

Carbon firewall cover: are you going to smooth it with 600 grit and give it some 2k canned clearcoat (catalyzed polyurethane)? That would make it quite nice, just an idea.

Also: what type of paint did you use on the engine? and if you used primer also, what type of primer?
Trying to think back at why I didn't use a wire wheel or something similar.. and I'm pretty sure it's because I forgot about that at the time lol. I remember thinking after I cleaned it: Oh right, wire wheels exist! lol.... oops, it'll be fine though. The other thing is I thought another time when I have the engine apart (i.e. to upgrade internals) that I would then sandblast each component as then they'd be small enough to fit into the sand blaster.

Yeah, I don't know what to do. I figure I'd just redo it. The hardest part was getting the exact profile, and now I have it. Plus, by then I might find a way around the slave cylinder, because with this design it was directly in the way and had to cut around it. I did kinda rush finish the carbon wall and didn't sand properly :/ I've heard about this 2K clear before, curious to try it out sometime.

For the first time I used VHT paint, but I believe they're owned by Duplicolor so they might be the same in the end. It was a high heat enamel. I think this one was labeled for use on calipers or something. Seeing as how this is an enamel primer was not used because it's not necessary in that case.
 
#29 · (Edited)
Well as promised here's one more post for today.

While painting the engine I sandblasted whatever components I could and painted those as well.






While on the valve covers I thought this would be a neat touch. Hopefully it lasts against the heat:


While I was at it, I wanted to cut open the holes here to show the cam gears. I'll say I got that idea from having seen someone else do it, cannot remember the username or name on FB for who did it.


Had some rubber stripping here to seal that off nicely:





Had some fun cutting up the oil cap to do this:





Now, things are about to get a but crazy in the world of custom components. So, personally I have a preference of no power steering. IMO it's not hard to control at low speeds (just go to the gym and build some muscle lol). I also like to reduce weight & clutter wherever possible, which naturally leads to wanting to remove the power steering pump since it's useless in a de-powered scenario. The problem though is you more or less have no choice for the serpentine belt to go where the power steering pump is located. At first I tried something that I wasn't very confident in so I'm not even gonna show it lol, but then I figured I'd do the next best thing which was to cut as much material away from the pump as possible. With an angle grinder. It was weirdly satisfying.




Now you must wonder: Am I gonna mount that massive original pulley? Of course not! I'm gonna hack that apart too and use a spare lightweight alternator pulley I had and combine those items:


In order to make that work I just needed to 3D print a little black adapter here so that the alterntor pulley remains centered:


Finally I gave it an ugga-dugga or two which I think will hold it well:
 
#30 ·
Next on the de-powered steering: the de-powered steering rack. I've looked into this, and on cars like the Miata it is somewhat more common for someone to go through the process of converting their steering rack to a de-powered setup. Ultimately what this means is disconnect all power steering fluid lines, closing off the ports, remove all fluid and replace it with wheel bearing / CV axle grease. And also cutting away one key seal deep inside the steering rack. That is, it would have to come fully apart. This is the only item that I needed some help with in my entire year-long project because simply put: I don't have the tie rod tool, while an

auto shop does. So here is how that went:


Practiced and messed around with the original rack first. What a mess:











Then the other shop put it back together for me and I installed it in the car. Really looking forward to trying it out.
 
#32 ·
Nice updates...thanks...
 
#37 · (Edited)
Well @RetfirDMX you've convinced me. Turns out there's a Napa near where I live and they had these spray cans so I picked up three today. Really, right on time, because I am a matter of days away from needing to use clear coat so I think you've probably helped me out a lot here. I am in the meantime going to research it more to ensure I use it properly.

EDIT: Done some research now, and, I think I lucked out big time. Once I'm at the stage to grab a photo of why I say that I will post it.
 
#41 ·
Well @RetfirDMX
EDIT: Done some research now, and, I think I lucked out big time. Once I'm at the stage to grab a photo of why I say that I will post it.
@RetfirDMX Sorry a bit delayed on this. I actually finished the hood but here's the portion where I used that clear:


See, when you posted about the SprayMax that was right at the time when I was getting ready to spray the hood.
Unfortunately I messed up the CF fabric on it, but I figured out why and learned from it for next time. I will redo it next year probably. But for now this will have to do, I have to get driving my supercharged Tib! Especially since my I4 GK broke down a couple days ago and don't have a car at the moment :/

Here's another little teaser image:


Man, what a learning process this project still continues to be...
 
#38 ·
glad to hear it. it's my favorite clearcoat-in-a-can. i used it to clearcoat my car's eyelids and cf wing, as well as my mr2's fender flares and wheels. has been holding up nicely over the years without fading or dulling
 
#40 ·
well how hard can it be? lol, really though, painting isn't that bad but like most things it does take some time and practice to get it to the quality level you'd hope for. So I totally understanding taking a few days to modify and paint the valve covers. I think I spent about the same amount of time on mine, and honestly I should have spent more. I am going back to valve covers and going to fix some filler issues and repaint a couple sections.
 
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