I ran out of tubing before I got both front forward tubes bent up, but I got one done and mocked into place. I need tubing for the door bars and seat belts as well but those will be easy. I order up a bunch of interlocking clamps to make the door bars and diagonal all removable so those are on their way - as for the seat belt bar I am trying to figure out if I want external clamps to get it completely out of the way for back seat egress or not.
inline interlocking clamps
external clamps that will come completely out of the way but are bulky
I might make the door bars have the same external clamping but worry about the rigidity in a crash. Issue is I don't think any of these items are SCCA legal so having a car I can run in Super Production may be out of the question. The joints that SCCA allows in the rules are straight out of the 60s and about as fugly as they come - I don't understand why they haven't updated the rules to allow for the much stronger, nicer, modern interlocking clamps but I will find out if they do by the time I am ready to tech the chassis. I can understand if they balk at the external clamps since they are able to rotate and tear the bar off in a crash, but the inline ones are as strong as it comes.
Nonetheless, some update shots with the one forward tube mocked in which gives me plenty of room to build suspension rockers off of, the rear down tubes, and I have the oil tank mocked up and feel really confident I can keep it there and it does indeed fit better with the firewall out of the way and back on my new bulkhead. One pic as the front tire turned a bit and even at full rotation it never gets in the way, but the rotation shown in the image is more than I ever expect to turn it. On the track I would turn less than 1/2 turn on any corner in both the Porsche and the new Vette and those have about the same travel/rev (around 2-1/8"/rev. The pic shown is more like one full turn of the wheel and I intend to limit the rack to ~1.5" travel (about 3/4 turn) with a 2"/rev pinion.
The third image shows an S10 rack that Unisteer sent me for test fitting - I will be giving them new dims and mount items I need and get a rack coming hopefully next week here.
Last shot I took the old dash display apart and cleaned it up a bit - really bummed because the speedo numbers started to wipe off with just water and a paper towel! Even so, I intend to leave this in there showing the 64,228 orig miles the car had before I hacked into it and I hope to replace the fuel gauge with a new one if it matches the ohm output of my fuel cell (I have a GM fuel sender in it but I think there are a couple different ohm ranges over the years). I have a carbon fiber gauge but want to use the stock one of possible and then get a Racepak dash and mount it on top of a radio delete panel in the center of the dash.