Introducing myself and my 72 Nova!

[nickcornilsen]

So then work began on tearing the car down. The old 9" axle and front sub frame had to go. I was able to recoup a bit of coin by selling these, which was nice.



I threw one of the 295 rear tires under the front, just for kicks.



In order to design this thing, I needed the tires and wheels, so I could figure out the track width. So i spent $1200 on tires and wheels! Aint no thang. Fronts are 265 35 17s, the rears are 315 30 18's. I also bought the corvette front and rear suspension drop-outs, and transmission.





And with that, I began the design. All CAD'd so I could have pieces cut on a water jet.
I needed to narrow the track width about 3 inches... the only steering rack that was close to the right width was from a 93-02 camaro. It is 4 inches narrower than a C5, but mounts differently.






After finishing the design, I had the parts cut out on a water-jet.





At this point, I needed to build my jig. I had all of the pieces cut out so they had a "datum" tab that was on a plane 5" above the simulated ground. i needed to build the rails for that to sit on.

[nickcornilsen]

And, the assembly begins.




I spent about two hours tweaking and finessing the front cradle to be square. Doing this, you find out that factory control arms aren't perfect. Turns out the left control arm is sprung about .090 too far. I ended up getting the whole thing squared to itself within .032, and to the chassis to .032 as well.

One of the cool things about using precision water-jet cutting to make these parts is that I was able to make most of the parts self-fixturing. See the steering rack mounts below.





At this point, I started doing track-days on my SV650... this pretty much ate all of my car budget and time, so I didnt start working on it again until a few weeks ago.

By the way, does anyone from this site do car track days at Oregon Raceway? that track is amazing. very technical.

I'll post some more pics in a few.