Let's Get Nuts! — Apex Attack

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’ll admit, I planned on more frequent, smaller blog posts than what you’ve seen recently. But, it’s winter, and I’m not a one trick pony. Cars aren’t my only hobby, in fact they play second fiddle to skiing. If you followed my old build thread (build thread link), I used to live in Colorado, for the only reason of being a ski bum.

Things have changed, I think for the better. I’m happily married now, pursuing a career I’m really excited about, and living in the Pacific Northwest. When we get snow here, skiing takes priority of my weekends, and most of my free time.

It feels like the work on the car has slowed, but when editing these photos I realized A LOT has been happening. This blog post is really just a glimpse at all the beers being drank, heads being scratched, and attempting ideas the only way I know, by making it up as I go (or googling it).

Where we left off, I had just simply bolted on one of my rear fender flares to see how close of a fitment we’d be working with. Surprisingly, fitment wasn't that awful! It pulled off the look I wanted.

To start though, let’s go back to my Autopista rep spoiler… or really what’s next to it. The 90s extendo antenna. Nothing is more Saved By The Bell/90210 than these contraptions. My SW20 came with the windshield antenna as well, and I’m not into the 15 foot coat hanger hanging out back, so it was time to gut this guy. I’m saving some precious pounds out back too!

The antenna motor is listed at 3 pounds. I’ll take it. Any weight out of the booty helps.

Grime time under the spoiler piece. Not worried about plugging that hole since the spoiler piece covers it and is sealed from the elements.

Once the antenna is gone, we have to fill this hole on the passenger side spoiler piece. Let’s play with fiberglass!

First lay some clear tape on the exterior side. Make sure you lay a piece using the smooth side (NOT STICKY) on the hole, then cover that piece with a larger one.

Shadetree Mechanic Tip: Use those cheap little 1-time paint brushes for applying your epoxy and fiberglass sheets. It really helps saturate the fiberglass cloth.

Here it is hardened and the tape removed. I tried to get the fiberglass to sit as flush as possible with the rest of the piece.

Not bad, eh? Still needs final glazing and sanding before paint. But it shouldn't be noticeable, and since the spoiler piece is also fiberglass (I think), it shouldn’t crack during temp swings.

Ok, let's bring out the implements of destruction. Edd China once quoted, "People say nothing ventured, nothing gained. Other people will say this is sacrilege."

I used a Harbor Freight airsaw for most of the cutting, and it did a nice job. Some of the tougher spots around the exterior trim pieces and bumpers, required some shoulder shrugs, a steady hand, deep breaths, and the ol' sawzaw, .

All hacked up! You can now see into the depths of the chassis, the inner and outer fender are no longer joined. Lots of crap could get sprayed into that void; grime, roadkill, and the egos of more expensive car owners we pass, so we need to seal that up. On my last car, I made relief cuts on the inner fender, hammered it out to the outer fender, and used a construction adhesive to seal it up. It worked… but was starting to fail a few years later. I also want to restore the structural integrity of the chassis. Let's do it right this time, and borrow a friends' 110v Mig welder. Time to learn how to MIG weld!

For prep, I relief cut the inner fender again and bent the tabs back towards the outer fender.

I was also given some free sheet metal in the same gauge as the fenders (I think 16g?), score. It was a bit crusty, but a tiger disc can take care of that.

Cut and fit. Take your time here, the better the piece fits, the easier the welding goes.

Tacked in. Each side took 3 pieces to close the gap.

And welded up! I know, hammered dogshit. Let me explain.

This sheetmetal is thin, crazy thin. After burning some holes in the inner fender I realized I could only spot weld the entire panel. So, that’s what I did. This was also my very first Mig weld… so, it could be worse? After smoothing out the welds and priming/undercoating, these will be hidden anyways. I feel better having the fenders tied together structurally again too. Hopefully the chassis feels better than a wet noodle.

I forgot pics of the finished fender… expect those next post. If you guys want an even better explanation of this process, Wheeler Dealers just had a great episode of building an AMG replica Mercedes with flares, look it up (Season 13 ep 11).

OK! Back to fitting this passenger side fender flare. The 180sx has its’ gas door on the passenger side, and the Rocket Bunny pulled out all the stops to make sure you could still gas up your car with a fancy cutout. The SW20 gas door is on the drivers side… soooo, this won’t look right.

All cut out. Now to shave it and make it look like it was never there.

After keeping myself up at night trying to figure out how to rebuild this part of the flare, I turned to the internet, and got a solution. FLOAM! I mean, foam! (if you remember Floam, bonus points for living this long) Some hobby store pieces were cut up and trimmed to fit as best as I could. Then wrapped in packaging tape.

Fiberglassed a bunch of strips to the back of the flare so we'd have some structural rigidity.

Then mounted the flare and fit the foam.

First layer done!

After it cured, I pulled the flare, the newly fiberglassed part just popped right off. As you can see, some of the matting moved on me during the curing process, creating a hole once I sanded it down a bit. I'M NOT PERFECT. STOP YELLING AT ME.

Three layers later, it’s getting strong, stronger than the rest of the flare actually. Let's hit this itch with some 80 grit.

Rough shape starting to show through. And apparently, that’s where I stopped taking pictures of this. After shaping it a bit more and some filler, it really looks and feels like it was never a cutout. I’m surprised it turned out as good as it did, but I guess after hours of glassing and sanding, anything is possible. I'm sure there's a faster, better way of doing this (feel free to inbox me with better ways), I'm no fiberglass pro.

Now that we had one flare fitting well, let’s go to the other side. That’s where things get a little tricky, replicating the same fitment on the drivers side. There’s a fudge factor allowable here… but let’s try to be as precise as we can. To do that, I set up a simple grid system using OEM landmarks on the body (like rear quarter windows), and painters tape. With a laser level, I measured where each hole sits on the horizontal and vertical parts of the fender. Using the grid system with measurements, it was pretty simple to get the holes transferred within ¼" or so. If you don't have a line level, you could make a crude plumb bob with string and a heavy bolt.

Before we start hacking away at the drivers’ side fender… remember the body harness we ran through that cavity? I would rather not cut it in half with my airsaw. So, it had to be pulled back through the trunk.

WOW. It fits!

Except for the gas door. I would like to drive this car further than the 5 gallons in the tank currently, so we have to do something about this.

You are probably saying, “Mike, you never told us what you did about the stupid side vents!” Patience, grasshopper. I didn’t really know what to do either, until I found some side vent scoops for sale locally. For $40, they were mine.

After some freehand-frisky cutting, they started to look like they’d fit well.

Right on! Except for that gap on the top. But we have fiberglass filler for that.

Add filler, sand to fit. By now, about 30% of my car is filler.

This fiberglass filler seems very durable. Now that gap is much less, things look more complete.

Now we hack up the driver side and weld the fenders shut, and re-pull the body harness. Easy, right?! Nah, that’s a solid 8 hours of putzin' in the garage at my glacial pace.

(Paying attention? I had to re-use this ^ image, sorry)

Here’s the body harness re-installed back in the fender cavity. It now runs above the gas filler tube. This was before welding the fender back up. For some reason pulling the harness through this time was one of the most colorful language sessions I’ve had with this car.

Back to that pesky gas door.

Since we fully shaved one on the other flare, why not cut one in here and finish it to fit?

Where we cut for the fuel door, we lose a very important bolt location for the flare. So, we will add two more on each side of the door to make up for it and massage the flare to hug the cars curves better.

Let’s re-use the old passenger side fuel door cutout for this side, trimmed down to fit.

Tape the car body, and duct tape the new piece in place. Then fiberglass the piece in from the bottom.

Voila! Getting the hang of hacking and gluing fiberglass parts together now!

Add a dash of our favorite ingredient, filler, some sanding, looks like it’ll work.

Whaddya know, the gas door opens now without a hitch.

Remember those two fasteners around the gas door to help correctly attach the flare? Just screwing those screws in looked a bit, half ass. I only do things full ass! To fix this, I wanted to cut in rivet inlays like the rest of the flare. First I reinforced behind the flare with globs of fiberglass filler.

My new dremel has seen a lot of use. It came with a little stone cutting wheel which happened to be the perfect shape.

I filled the gelcoat cracks with epoxy and re-ground the inlay again, like it was part of the flare in the first place.

So the rear flares are starting to feel more complete. But… they were too tall. So about 2” had to be cut off the bottoms. Bust out the dremel, and a shaky hand!

Is the suspense of seeing the whole car killing you yet? Yeah it was for me too, but I had a couple small projects still…

Let’s return to the front of the car. Remember when I didn’t know what to do with the front fender where it cuts off down to the side skirt? Yeah, I still don’t know. I see other cars with metal/carbon covers there, like this.

It looks good, and ties the car together well in my opinion. Mine would be much more crude version, probably no cool vents with version 1.0. So, I decided to try it with some cardboard first.

Crude, sorta ugly. But, it’s cardboard. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The jury is still out on this one, so I’m gonna let it hang there and see if it grows on me. I could always build them later.

The last little project for this (big) installment of aero mods (or bolting stupid shit onto an already great looking car), was a gurney flap. Know what a gurney flap is? It’s those badass wing extensions you see on old BMW M3’s.

Pretty cool, eh? And functional! You can read more about the science behind gurney flaps here: http://allamericanracers.com/the-gurney-flap/

Basically, they provide a boost in downforce, without much added drag. I looked at M3 versions, but they were all super pricey for something I was likely going to cut up. So I went to ebay. Hey… R32 GTR’s have the same style flap too!

$150 later, a fiberglass knock off showed up at my door. But would it fit?

Short answer… no. :( It was too wide, and the GTR wing is much thinner, so the hooking connection point didn’t line up. But don’t worry, it’s fiberglass! Let’s hack it up and get it to fit! First we cut an inch off each side and attach the ends again.

Snip snip.

More packing tape and fiberglass.

Just add filler and it fits.

It needs refinements, but I’m digging it!

Ok, let’s roll this beast out of the garage and see what it all looks like. We’ve had a crazy winter here in the PNW, lots of snow. Good time to check the winter tire traction of my R1R’s with some donuts. News flash, they don’t grip snow well. Drumroll please...

OMG Becky. Look at her butt.

Diggin’ the side profiles. Shaving the passenger side gas door and adding a driver side gas door cutout really completes the look. Adding the vent add-ons helps tie the flare into the rest of the body works pretty good too. Whaddya think, try and build those front fender whatchamacallits or not?

Front end looks the same, but things aren’t done here either.

Overall, the look is really aggressive. I hope I didn’t go too over the top… but the car looks MEAN in person, which I really like.

From here, I REALLY need to align the car (remember the Wilhelm Geometry Kit?), make sure the front suspension and steering work without things rubbing, put the interior together, update the brakes, and start getting all this junk ready for paint. So, still a TON of work to do, but we have serious momentum. I’m planning to sign up for a track day in May… why have goals if not to miss them?