X2! Very Cool

Happy Fourth of July everyone!!

The car is officially in body and paint now!!

The paint booth has been loaded up three times with all the miscellaneous parts and those are all painted now.

The bottom of the body tub is next.

Color is not far away!!

As you relax and enjoy your Holiday, here are some of the latest videos of the build for your viewing pleasure. Kind of like one of those cable channel holiday weekend marathons!!:popcorn2:

So glad all the rust is finally behind us now. For all of you still in the middle of rust repair, stay the course. There is light at the other end of the tunnel.







Here are videos of the mock up for the Detroit Speed QUADRALink and the Wilwood brakes.







ENJOY!!

Its coming a long nice Lou.

Things are coming along. The bodywork has officially begun.
The engine upgrade parts supplied by Thomson Automotive have been installed by Tony, my favorite, fully certified Chevrolet technician. Tony is the only person I would let work on my Z06 and my daily driver.
He takes great pride in everything he does and he loves his work. In fact, everyone I have talked to at Weber Chevrolet in Waterloo, Ill. treats you like they are glad to see you. I have purchased brand new cars from both Mercedes and Lexus. They have nothing over the customer service and attitude I experience in Weber's service department.

Here's Tony looking proud of his work, like the engine is his baby. (Actually, he and his wife are expecting their first real baby very soon!)

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While delivering the engine so they could paint it all up nice too, I snapped a few pictures of Nathan and Zach's handywork preparing the body tub for paint.

When I noticed how they are making sure the rockers are perfect all the way around to the floor pan I complimented Nathan. He calmly replied that he has noticed some body men can get a little lazy in those areas and that has always been a pet peeve of his.

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I love how the firewall turned out. We had to recess it a bit.

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My son Dan assembled the grille he designed and printed in Renntech's 3D printer. He is also a perfectionist when it comes to his craft so he wants to make some final tweaks but it looks like it's going to turn out exactly like he wanted it to. Here's a picture he sent me from his cell phone. We'll post more on that as things progress.


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Great pics!! Everything looks great. A couple of questions:
1) What update did you do to the engine.
2) What is the custom grill made of...fiberglass, metal, carbon fiber, etc.? (can't tell by the pics)

Engine upgrades include Cam, valve springs, injectors, pulleys, solid coupling, damper and matching tune by Dave Mikels who works very closely with Brian at Thomson Automotive.

Dave and Brian are great to work with too. They sent the parts overnight delivery just to make sure we could get them installed in time to avoid any delays in body and paint. I especially appreciated their willingness to help us out because their main business is selling complete engines not selling parts.

Dave helped us figure out how to do a lot more with the ECM than just tune it for the performance mods. He also helped us enable things like reverse lock out using vehicle speed sensing, PWM fan control and AC compressor pressure sensing for cooling fan control.

The first grille prototype was printed in ABS plastic.

Looks great Lou! Can you explain what you mean by "PRINTED" in ABS plastic??

I remember a while back on Jay Lenos car garage show he had an episode on this stuff. Awesome technology.

One of the first of these companies I was exposed to was 3D Systems back in 1986. Back then it was used primarily as product prototyping, and still is. Amazing technology and the indusrty has come a long way very quickly. Today there are forums and downloads for design files. You can make anything from a microscopic piano, to a fully functioning semi-auto.

Lou, your son made a fabulous grill. Can't wait to see it mounted!

The video does a nice job of explaining what 3D printing is overall.

To actually print our grille, Dan used a machine that uses a little different technology.
Instead of a powder bed as shown in the video, the machine Dan uses feeds the plastic of his choice, in the form of a monfilament line, into a heated nozzle that melts it and deposits it in very small droplets, one layer at a time.

It literally "builds" the 3 Dimensional part, one very thin layer at a time. Think of it as a lazor printer that deposits solid plastic instead of colored ink. It just keeps deposting one layer at a time as instructed by the design he puts into it.

To create the design itself, he first scanned a stock 69 Camaro grille with a
hand held, 3D scanner similar to the one in the video above. That gave him a computer model of the stock grille.

Next he replaced portions of the stock design with his own design ideas. His new design is then converted to a CAD file that can provide instructions to the 3D printer.

The grille in the picture is what came out of the 3D printer. It is an actual ABS plastic part that will be finished and used on the car.

Fascinating stuff. We plan to post a video of the entire process from start to finish with the grille in the car.

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