Hayden's Cars- Annual update!

[Hayden]

Posting this here so it’s hopefully findable to the wider interwebs, and also a great excuse to take the new forum software’s table system for a spin.

It’s hard to find the weight of car panels, which makes it tricky to know where to start when considering replacing them with composite. In the case of the Chrysler 300c, weight reduction information doesn’t exist at all. So I went and weighed a heap of the panels myself. This applies directly to the 300c, but might give you an idea of panel weights for other cars too.

Part	kgs/areaM2	IBS
Bonnet	10.2 / 1.76	22.48
Boot (stock)	6.8 / 1.26	15
Boot (gutted)	5.3 / 1.26	11.7
Front Door (Gutted)	26.2 / 1.44	57.8
Front Bar W/Grille	7.8 / 1.6	17.2
Fender	4.7 /1.26	10.36

It’s not we’ll known that the 300 series uses Aluminium for both the boot and bonnet, making those panels around half the weight of a steel item. The doors are very heavy, even gutted with no door cards and Lexan windows, our front doors weigh nearly 30KG. This makes them a good candidate for replacement.

Looking forward, i’ve acquired a good amount of carbon fibre. The plan is to replace the rear doors and rear quarter panels with a single piece of carbon fibre, which I will make from a mould.

The fronts will be more complicated, requiring two seperate pieces that I’ll have to join, install some kind of window and actually be able to open and close like a door. Still wrapping my head around that! 🤔

All in, I plan to save around 80KG replacing the 4 doors & rear quarter panels with carbon fibre. Looking forward to sharing the process with you!
Top job on the software @Jordan

 

[Jordan]

Cheers, nice to see you are putting the new table feature to work already! 😁

 

[Hayden]

So step one is done, I’ve created a mould of the rear doors / rear quarter panels. I did it the cheap way, using vinyl wrap I had laying around to seal the door jams and around the windows. I also used automotive wax followed by hair spray to seal the paintwork.

Layup was pretty painless, though the chopped strand mat I used was very thick and took an immense amount of resin to wet out. I’m concerned the piece I did with that as a base will lack detail, but we’ll see.

It took the entire weekend to do all that to both sides of the car, and I finally pulled the moulds tonight.

All that’s left is to fill in imperfections (creases from the vinyl, etc) on the inside of the mould, then I can pull my carbon bits. If the weight of the mould is anything to go by, these parts are gonna save tonnes! 😁

 

[Hayden]

it’s taken a lot more work and time than I’d planned, but today I finally got to pull my first carbon part. Man it was a lot of work.

if you’ve ever considered doing work with fibreglass moulds, here’s a couple things I’ve learned.

• Do yourself a favour and use the lightest possible Chopped Strand Mat (CSM) for the very first layer of your mould. I used heavy CSM for one mould, and fibreglass cloth for the other and both had pretty big flaws in detailed parts which led to a lot of unnecessary filler work.
• Vinyl worked well for protecting the window rubbers and sealing the door joins. I’d created creases through impatience which also had to be filled. Next time I’d definitely take the time with the heat gun to get those out before they become a solid part of the mould.
• I used Estapol floor varnish to seal the filler, which I then sanded to get a pretty smooth finish. It didn’t fully work though, and some filler came with when I pulled the carbon part. It washed off the carbon, but I’d have to fix the mould if I wanted to pull another part off of it. Next time I’d use 3-4 coats rather than 2.
• I messed up when moulding around the door handle and couldn’t fix it in the mould without cutting it all up. So the carbon part will have a bit of a funny dent there which I might cut off for a NACA duct to cool the brakes.
• Carbon comes in 1m wide rolls, so I needed a join somewhere. I did an ok job lining it up around the window, but it goes a bit off track behind it. I’ll be more careful next time.
• The showing layer is carbon, with a vertical layer of carbon/Kevlar followed by a horizontal layer of carbon/Kevlar and reinforcing foam tubes. The Kevlar adds a lot of flexibility and should resist the shattering that carbon is known for.
• I debated buying peel ply to soak up resin from the inside of the panel. In the end I just really wanted to lay it up and now I kinda regret it. I have some resin puddles on the inside of the part which look a bit average, and I could’ve saved some weight with peel ply soaking up the excess. I’ll order some for next time.

So with the boring stuff out of the way, let’s take a look at this thing!

I’ve still gotta get a bit of wax off of it, trim the edges and do a coat of resin on the outside to fix imperfections and make it shiny but I am freaking stoked with how it’s turned out. All us car nerds love carbon fibre and to actually build a part from scratch is something I’ve wanted to do for many years.

Wanna hear the best bit? This whole panel weighs 4.3KG.

 

[Hayden]

It’s funny to think of the things we do when we’re young and how they can continue to effect us as life goes on. Rewind to the early pages of this thread and you’ll see an 18 year old me, buying a dead stock JDM convertible and jumping with two feet into modifying it. I was young, I was single, I was passionate and I had no bloody idea what I was doing

It’s now been nearly 10 years since I started this thread. I still own the car, and the choice to TT swap an incredibly rare car, using the cheapest donor vehicle I could find, paying an unqualified friend to do the work, must be one of the stupidest things I ever did in my life.

To date, that decision has probably cost me $15k + as I’ve paid every mechanic I can find to try to turn it into the reliable and fun car of my teenage dreams. This culminated about 3.5 years ago, with a near $8k bill that ended with the car breaking in the first 10km of driving, and once repaired being parked up in disappointment.

Since then I’ve had two kids and been married. I’m in a completely different career and at the stage in life where you need to make decisions. My new career (12 months today! ) is fantastic, and involves me talking to motoring enthusiasts all day about their vehicles and helping them with insurance on their special cars. Truly a dream job and something I can see myself doing for a long time.

Now the thing about working for a specialist motoring-enthusiast company, is you work with other car people. And once these car people catch wind that you’ve got something weird sitting at home they start asking “why don’t you drive your car?” And after a while the bad memories fade and you think to yourself, jeez, maybe I should actually use the thing.

Which brings us to today. Over the last few weeks I did some minor servicing and admin jobs on the car, then today I drove it into work to celebrate my first year with the company.

It’s a weird thing, stepping back into a car that I haven’t used properly for the better part of a decade. The smell is the same as when I first bought it; this weird, wispy, old dude aroma that’s managed to stick in the Fairlady Z floor mats from garage to garage. The feeling of driving it topless is exactly as fun and freeing as I remember. The sounds and feeling of the TT engine make for an unmistakably 90’s Nissan driving experience, which always makes me smile.

There’s a long list of little stuff that needs to be tidied up, but the car is now registered, insured (naturally) and at a point where it can be driven safely. I plan on using it for the next 12 months on a regular basis, fixing the issues along the way and finally giving it a chance to be the car of my young dreams. At that point I can decide if it’s time to make the hard decisions, but I just want to give the car the chance to prove that while 18 year old Hayden was certainly stupid, he may have had a good idea at heart.

 

[zeptrans]

The 300ZX is a rare car to see on the road.

300C... 300ZX... Next car is the 300SL

It's looks like someone else is interested by the famous dual 350Z/S2000.
I was looking to buy one of it, these cars are surprisingly very cheap (in Europe, base model 350Z under 10000euros, and a little bit more for S2000). The fact I was looking for a daily car, with enough space at the back, made me turn my choice on a mk1 Focus RS, more expensive, but insurance is way cheaper.

It's the good time to buy a JDM car, they already start to be expensive, or very very expensive, sometimes it makes no sense (hello AE86).

PS: the Nismo wheels

 

[Hayden]

The 300ZX is a rare car to see on the road.

300C... 300ZX... Next car is the 300SL

It's looks like someone else is interested by the famous dual 350Z/S2000.
I was looking to buy one of it, these cars are surprisingly very cheap (in Europe, base model 350Z under 10000euros, and a little bit more for S2000). The fact I was looking for a daily car, with enough space at the back, made me turn my choice on a mk1 Focus RS, more expensive, but insurance is way cheaper.

It's the good time to buy a JDM car, they already start to be expensive, or very very expensive, sometimes it makes no sense (hello AE86).

PS: the Nismo wheels

I definitely wouldn’t say not to a 300SL. My bank account however

I was definitely interested in the 350Z & S2K before I ended up buying my GT86. Back then you could get a good one of either for about $20k. Now a 350Z is $15k and the S2Ks are fetching $40k +.

The price of older JDM cars in Australia have gone crazy during covid. Supra, NSX, AE86, Silvia & GTR are now seen as proper classics. The others have gone up in association. It happened really fast and nobody can really understand why.

 

[Hayden]

It’s been a while and some stuff has happened. With the 300c out of action (Rod Knock) I entered the 86 into the Legends Hillclimb.

Keen to see what the stock car could do with decent rubber, I shelled out for some pilot sport 4 tyres. Weirdly it’s the first tyres I’ve bought for it in 9 years of ownership. I’ve always bought wheels (with decent second hand rubber) when I needed tyres, which has been a fun way of regularly changing up the cars look.


Shod with the PS4’s it was a 5 hour drive, with a wife, a 1 year old and a 2 year old, to my favourite event of the year. My life has changed a lot since I bought an 86 at 19 years of age, but this car never ever fails me.


As always the event was awesome. I met up with some 86/BRZ friends, and we pushed each other along all weekend. The competitive banter was real!


At the end of the weekend I’d hit a 1.01.60. A couple seconds faster than the only other time I drove this car there (pre-Chrysler), and fast enough for 86th of 150 outright. Pretty good for a stock car that arrived there with 2 baby seats!


As a bit of a bonus, I even took home some silverware. Third in class for road registered <2L, which is actually a super competitive class!



Onto the Zed and ehhh… it’s not in the good books. I had an alternator failure cause a breakdown a few months back. For 2 hours I sat in the dark and cold, out front of an uninhabited country motel, with a dead phone, hoping a friend had got my message and was coming to get me. Luckily he did.

That ended up being a $2000 repair, with boost leaks, power steering and brake master issues sorted at the same time. I collected the car, drove it home, went to take it for a nice sunny drive and smelt something super weird and electrical.

I pulled over, opened the bonnet and saw a coil pack literally on fire. I put it out with my hands, borrowed some electrical tape from a store nearby, taped up the damaged wires and drove it home on 5 cylinders. That was a couple months ago and I’m just so done with it that I haven’t even looked at it since.

Anyone whose followed this thread knows I’ve had a pretty bumpy ride in the 10 years I’ve owned this car. In retrospect, swapping out a perfectly good NA engine, for a TT from an ex show car dragged from a paddock; with the help of a mate (who was just as hopeless as me) was a terrible decision and lead to all my issues. I was young, I wanted boost-y noises, but man, it’s been never ending headaches since.


So… what now. Well I am actively considering selling both the 86 and Zed for a GR Corolla. I’ve had my name down for one for 18 months, and the dealer called me recently to tell me I’m next on the list.

It’s a difficult thing, but I honestly think I’m ready to admit defeat on the Z and get myself one car that can be everything I want. A daily, a kid chariot, a weekender for car shows, a track car and something I can hang onto for dear life while ICE engines go extinct. I think that car is a GR and I think the time has nearly come.

 

[wfooshee]

Those ZEDs are one of the best-looking cars Nissan has ever built. In my mind, they are simply gorgeous!

I would never have one, though. That opinion comes from watching them in IMSA races back in the day. Blue exhaust smoke during cornering. All the time, every turn, every one of them I ever saw! Running oil through the combustion doesn't seem right...