continued from above
Since late 2014 we have had our own in-house CNC machines which has helped us to dramatically shorten our development cycle - now we skip the 3D modeling phase completely, and of course do not have to wait on an outside machine shop. This has cut development time down from weeks to hours. Example: we made a new camber plate for the 2015 Mustang S550 chassis in 48 hours, from the time the car rolled into our shop to the time it we had production quality camber plates installed.
This rapid machining process was replicated in 2016 with our customer "Scottish" Joe's 2013 Camaro 1LE. There were some issues we needed to improve on our original prototype 5th gen plates we made for the LGM race car which we remedied on the pre-production set for Joe's Camaro earlier this year.
Chevrolet also added a strut tower brace on some models that wasn't present on the 2010-11 cars, so the shape of our plate was changed to fit around that. The camber plate itself is a fairly straightforward affair - two plates (with more intricate shapes than seen here) sandwich the top of the strut tower. To adjust camber our "spherical bearing holder" slides in and outboard relative to this sandwich. There is no caster adjustment in our design, and the other designs we've seen only change caster by rotating the main plate (which will change caster and camber concurrently). We made it this way for a reason - this chassis has plenty of caster and needs all of the camber adjustment (and easy track side re-adjustment) it can get.
We have a production batch of 5th gen plates being machined here later this week, along with a new OEM spring perch option to go along with the 3 coilover spring perch sizes we offer for this car now. I'll show some red anodized, production pieces in my next post.
WHAT'S NEXT?
I'm trying to keep this first post brief and will cover more of our parts development and testing in future posts. We've tested Bilstein PSS10s on these cars, made custom brake cooling backing plates and inlets, fitted 19x11" Forgestars and 305mm tires at all four corners, installed Cobra racing seats, full length headers, brake pads, and more. We've learned several tricks along the way that I will share, too.
If you are new to Vorshlag build threads you will soon realize we post a lot of pictures and videos - and almost all of my pictures here can be clicked on to see higher rez versions. Pictures speak a 1000 words, and videos even more.
We have also done a few CAM class autocross events in Joe's 1LE and had a great showing at the 2016 Texas CAM Challenge, which was held last weekend. I will talk more about these events + some upcoming track tests in my next posts.
Cheers,