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July 6th "99
Bought a white imported Nissan Silvia (180sx) from Russell White of TopGun auto importers Brisbane. I used Coast line transporters to get it to Cairns and Tuxworth to get it to Weipa.
It was time to have a look at what I had to do to prepare for starting the construction and the first thing that came to mind was rule 3...Thou shalt not build your THING in MY carport or garage. Hmmmm that made things a bit more interesting but no problem, after having check the rest of the rules I decided to convert the wife's garden shed into something I could use to build my car. It started life as a 12 * 12, standard galvanised garden shed, I cut it in half to give me something that measured 24 * 6. I them layed a combination of bricks and very weak concrete to fill in a floor of 26 * 14 next to the house , assembled the half shed on my new slab and filled in the roof with a good quality tarp. I then put back the mower, whipper snipper and other gardening things and presto I had a shed which satisfied the "Rules".
I put together a standard chassis work table and was ready to start. While I was waiting for the Donor car to arrive I went and bought some reading material. The "LoCost Bible" from Ron Champion, a book from Carol Smith called "Tune To Win", RACE CAR Engineering Mechanics by Paul Van Valkenburgh and a copy of the Code Of Practice for light motor vehicles.
The steel arrived on the Aug 8th and so started the chassis design, width, length etc. I decided to stick with the standard length but widen the whole car by 133 mm. This gave me 500mm for passenger and driver, could fit the snug Nissan seats, had room to use the rear sub chassis and to gave me the foot room I needed to fit a firewall peddle box I plan to cut straight out from the Nissan. The problem was I don't have the car at this stage and so was basing all my measurements from a scale mock up from the photos.
The car arrived on the Aug 22nd and I started to confirm that all my measurements and construction to date were correct. After I checked I hadn't made any fundamental errors I continued to finish the first stage of the chassis so that I had something basic to work with. The rear hadn't been designed at this stage and like nearly everything else, it was nothing more than some ideas sketched on paper based on what I could work out from the photo's. But it was a start...
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