my latest project

redboost10

redboost10

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long story short, so the rules for the class that i race in allow for the removal of one headlight for a turbo inlet. usually everyone just takes the complete headlight out and the car looks very incomplete or like trash. very few make a nice aluminum box for a headlight.

i wanted to be different, i got together with a good family friend and decided to make it out of carbon fiber and adapt it to the actual headlight housing.

i am not sure who has any experience with this, but for me, i only had limited work with bondo and fiberglass and thats it.

so i started out with a huge sheet 4' x 8' of styrofoam from home depot to make the "plug". then used fiberglass to make the actual mold.

this weekend i will then lay the carbon fiber in the mold and vacuum pack/oven cure it. so im not totally finished beings there is a lot of steps between the plug and mold, including sanind the plug, wet sanding the plug, glazing it, polishing it, waxing it, spraying it with pba and then gel coat. i polished it 3m compound which i cant remember which one then used 3m perfect it II after the first compound. the wax was a mold release wax.

here are some pictures of us carving the plug outta the foam. this took about 8 hours.
 
here is when we glassed the styrofoam

the last picture is the glassed styrofoam with some bondo to get a smooth surface...which there is more to come to get a smoother surface.
 
Very cool ,Will have to send some pics to you when we finish our 240z engine swap .
 
I've seen a similar set up on a supra. Your fab work look's great.

Post a full engine shot, that snail looks huge
 
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Harleyguy, that sounds awesome! what's it going in?

Thank you Ryan, I will have some pictures of yesterday's progress up later today hopefully. I got one side of the mold done. just need to finish the other side then lay the carbon fiber and vacuum pack/oven cure it. I dont have a full engine bay shot, but here are a few random pictures. The turbo is a s372 with the race cover from bullseye turbo/borg warner. sorry the bay is kinda filthy in these pictures. i have detailed it since then when i was doing the exterior of the car.

last year we built the engine harness from scratch, so at the beginning of this year we ended up building the cabin/chassis harness from scratch as well, which allowed us to get rid of the 2 fuse boxes and the fuse panel that was in the car.
 
B16 or B18? You got one hell of a build right there. Looks like it's in an EK9, hatchback or coupe
 
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yeah its a ek9, 97 hatch. gsr block with 84mm golden eagle sleeves with portflow b16a2 head and oversized valves. im stuck on the 1.6L head, haha.
 
redboost10 said:
Harleyguy, that sounds awesome! what's it going in?

Thank you Ryan, I will have some pictures of yesterday's progress up later today hopefully. I got one side of the mold done. just need to finish the other side then lay the carbon fiber and vacuum pack/oven cure it. I dont have a full engine bay shot, but here are a few random pictures. The turbo is a s372 with the race cover from bullseye turbo/borg warner. sorry the bay is kinda filthy in these pictures. i have detailed it since then when i was doing the exterior of the car.

last year we built the engine harness from scratch, so at the beginning of this year we ended up building the cabin/chassis harness from scratch as well, which allowed us to get rid of the 2 fuse boxes and the fuse panel that was in the car.
Click to expand...
Older nissan skyline motor and turbo
 
that will be a fun ride. what size are those turbos? how is the rear end in those 240z's?
 
redboost10 said:
that will be a fun ride. what size are those turbos? how is the rear end in those 240z's?
Click to expand...
Not sure the size of the turbo we swaped out a rear from an infinti i30 Car was running awesome did some pulls on the dyno blew a piston looks like it leaned out some .Will look if the piston is still here.Car belongs too one of my techs no room here to rebuild so we towed it too a freinds shop.Will take some pics when it's back here again
 
yeah i want to see some pictures. anything unoriginal is cool, unless its a muscle car, haha.
 
Be sure to post up the finished turbo inlet when your done man, curious to see how it looks after be CF wrapped. Nice job :applause:
 
yeah i will for sure. thank you. just waiting for pictures to be emailed to me of the one side of the mold. going back this saturday to finish the other side of the mold then finish up the actual cf duct.
 
here are some more pictures.

1st pic: sprayed with polyester primer
2nd pic: you can see the orange spots where we had to fill some small pin holes with glaze so they wouldnt show up on our mold
3rd pic: the plug after two steps of polishing and some wax. i never new primer could be so shiny
4th pic: we have to make two molds so we positioned our plug according to where we want out break point, stacked styrofoam on the sides half way up the plug and made a paper template first
5th pic: traced the template on some malonie board and cut it out, then put another two layers of wax. also you can see down in the crevices of the flange where it slides over the plug there is clay which is to keep the resin from going through and ruining the inside surface which will eventually be the surface of the actual cf
 
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the orange stuff is gel coat. before the gel coat, we had to spray it with pba which dries as a film and serves as like cerran wrap so the mold releases from the flange. after this got to where it is just tacky but not wet we then had to lay down fiberglass matt, then cloth and repeat that 8 times.

the last picture here is the completed mold for that particular side. i am going back tomorrow to repeat the fiberglass matt and cloth steps on the other side then we will lay down the cf.
 
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thank you harleyguy. a lot of work for sure. the mold can be used to make about 50 parts before it starts decomposing, but i really dont plan to make more.
 
redboost10, the project is coming across amazing. Keep us updated with the future progress.
 
Very nice. It is always amazing the details that go into a project. I'm also impress with the exhaust manifold. Did you do that also? When will you race?
 
we tried to make a turbo manifold out of 16 gauge tubing and it didnt work, which we kinda figured it would be too light for supporting the turbo weight. but we tried and ran outta time last season so i ended up shelling out the cash for a turbo manifold. the two things we did not make on the car are the turbo manifold and the intake manifold.

we are going on the dyno march 27th and then maybe testing the car on the 29th.

thank you de and ryan for the kind words. I just pulled another all dayer today from 8:30am to 12:00am and almost done. i will have some updated pictures hopefully tomorrow of todays progress.

today, after sitting in the oven for about an hour and a half, i got to pull the mold off the plug and prep the surface of the mold that will be laid with carbon fiber which is more work than anyone would imagine. i also started laying the cf down and just couldnt stay on my feet any longer around 12.

thank you guys for reading up on this.
 
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