TARP Blog

Not that the headline above is setting the bar too high or anything; I don’t want you to misunderestimate me.

To paraphrase Ron Burgundy in the greatest film of all time, “Anchorman,” this past weekend was kind of a big deal for the TARP Team and the TARP Special (a/k/a “Tarpy”). For those of you out there who are executives, here is the executive summary: we got a lot done on the car. It’s not totally ready to race yet, but we could put it on the track today if we had to. Now go back to doing whatever it is that executives do. Execute, I guess. For the rest of us proles, here’s the update (now would be a good time to hit the bathroom and refill the coffee).

To start with, let’s recall what the car looked like when it went out to Jesse’s shop early in January, and then I’ll begin the tale of the long weekend past:

(continued after the jump:)

As you may recall from this earlier post, the cheapo Harbor Freight tube bender we had tried to use the weekend-before-last just didn’t work. So Jesse and Grayson picked up a new bender and fishmouth cutting jig (see here). Late on Friday morning, Jesse called me and said that UPS had delivered the bender and the jig and that he was going out to the shop to get them assembled and ready for work. I got some things finalized at the office for a hearing in Houston on Monday (yesterday), and then headed out to the shop to assist him.

Upon arrival I found that Jesse already had the kick-ass Pro-Tools Model 105 tube bender stand in the ground and the rest of it about halfway assembled, so I helped him to finish the assembly and lubrication of the metal parts. He cut a short length off the end of the pipe that was wrecked by the cheap Harbor Freight bender and proceeded to make a first test bend. Here’s Jesse making the first bend on the bender as well as the first bend:

 I hope he hangs it up on the wall or something as a trophy.

After we got the bender all done, we moved inside to get the Pro-Tools fishmouth cutter set up on the drill press. That took a bit more doing because we had to modify the stand for the jig so that it would fit the swing arm of the drill press while still giving us enough room to maneuver the tube off to the side for the angled cuts. I won’t bore you with the details, but that part of the setup took a lot longer than I think either of us thought it would take. Fortunately, by late on Saturday morning Jesse had fabricated a new stand and was able to get the fishmouth cutter working perfectly. That tool was a real lifesaver in terms of getting the roll cage done. It saved us hours upon hours of grinding and test fitting. For most of the roll cage joints, we were able to fishmouth one end of the tube, then test-fit and measure for length, then cut for length and fishmouth the other end, test for fit, do just a little bit of grinding to perfect the fit, and then weld it in place. We also used the software kit that Pro-Tools sells and it really made figuring out the size of the tube and where to put the bends in it a whole lot easier. If I were building another cage in the future (LeMons 2010?), I would definitely use all this equipment again. It all kicks butt.

And while I’m thinking about it, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to Jesse and Grayson for their work out at the shop and especially on the roll cage and the exhaust. They have the knowledge, skills, and tools to make it all happen and they showed remarkable dedication to the project, especially so this last weekend. To Grayson and Jesse, thanks a million for helping us to crank this out this weekend. If you two hadn’t pulled it together in the clutch, we would be so far in the weeds that we might not have been able to get the car ready in time for the race.

Okay, back to Friday night. Thanks to the ever-understanding Missus, I slept out at the shop on Friday night. This meant that I was able to get a lot of work done on getting the seat fitted into the car. After Jesse left around 7:00, I went to get some dinner and some random parts to make the seat work. Although I had bought a new set of Sparco seat glides and a universal base, it became clear that the stock seat base was going to work best due to the varied shape of the floor of the MR2. So I stripped the stock driver’s seat of the base and sliders and started to fit them in. I think I did a couple of other things on Friday night, but it’s all a blur now. All I know is that I worked until about midnight on Friday night on the seats and whatever else and then crashed out on the couch. It got really cold in there on Friday night, even with the small heater going. That’s a 4800 square foot shop out in the middle of the country and it was in the low-40’s overnight. I woke up cold and hungry at 7:00 on Saturday morning, raring to go.

After running out for breakfast and warm bathroom facilities, I got back on getting the seat fitted into the car. Jesse showed up around 10:00 or so, followed by Dave and Grayson a little later on. It worked out well that everyone showed up at different times because it meant that I was able to get the seat into the car without fighting for space with, for example, Grayson trying to fit in the main hoop, etc. I was able to use the stock seat base and the stock sliders (after some WD-40 action; I will need to grease up the sliders well before we go racing). The Kirkey race seat actually fit just about perfectly between the slider seat mounts, so I drilled out the holes in the seat and attached it with Grade 8 hardware (what’s the engineer’s refrain? “When in doubt, make it stout”?). Then I drilled out a new hole toward the back to lock it in good, used one existing hole on the other side, and locked it all down. And what takes one fairly boring paragraph to sum up was, in total, probably 5 or 6 hours of effort. Ha! Well, regardless of how long it took to get everything right, the seat is fitted into the car and looks and feels really good. Here’s what it looked like in the car before the cage got welded in:

The first photo shows the seat in the full-back position, the second one in the full-forward position. I think that with that full travel, we will be able to accomodate the full range of our drivers, from 5′5″ to 6′5″, hopefully all in relative comfort.

While I wasn’t expecting to have the seat and harnesses in this weekend, it was a real stress-reliever for me to see a major change in the car. The biggest change was yet to come: the roll cage.

Dave, Grayson, and Jesse got a ton of work done on the cage on Saturday, and then Grayson and I finished it up out at the shop pretty much all day on Sunday. Most, if not all, of the bending work was done by them on Saturday. Here’s Dave, Grayson and Jesse working on bending the main hoop:

I don’t really remember right now exactly what got done when on Saturday and Sunday in terms o the cage, but here are the photos for what it all looks like. Here’s the main hoop on the driver’s side where it lands on the perch:

And here you can see the main hoop skirting along the inside of the roof of the car. We placed the hoop as far to the rear as possible to maximize headroom for our taller drivers:

At one point I caught Dave sitting in the car making vroom-vroom sounds, althought he claims to have been investigating the wiring setup for the ignition circuit:

I have no idea how that can of beer got on top of the car. Or how it got into my truck and then into the refrigerator at the shop. No idea at all, officer.

Here’s the driver’s side door bar and the lower part of the A-pillar bar. Grayson designed the door bar so that it comes just above the lower edge of the seat. This allows the driver to sit on the door bar before lowering into the seat. Otherwise the relatively thin edge of the seat tries to get a little too friendly with the driver in the most uncomfortable of places, if you know what I mean:

This one shows the passenger side door bar as well as a diagonal that we put in that goes from down low to the main hoop. This diagonal really stiffens up the cage and, more importantly, makes it very unlikely that the main hoop could ever collapse. As a future driver of this car, I was and am a big advocate of this diagonal, even though it will probably reduce rearward vision marginally:

These are the rearward diagonal braces that go from the node at the top of the main hoop back to the front of the rear strut towers. You can see in the second photo how it was welded onto the strut tower. It was a late night on Saturday as the guys worked on bending and fitting the A-pillar bars:

This is what is known as a “halo” bar in a roll cage. I think you can see pretty clearly why it’s called that:

This is the harness bar with the adjustable seat back support. We can adjust that with the seat slides to ensure that we’re providing good back and neck support in the event that one of our drivers end-o’s somebody else or gets rear-ended:

Here are the tabs we welded onto the harness bar for attaching the shoulder harnesses:

While Dave, Grayson, and Jesse were working on the cage, I took care of some other odds and ends like putting the wheels back on the car, doing a full oil change, etc. Oh, and I used the plasma cutter to add some more lightness to the car. Here’s what the underside of the trunk lid looked like before I worked it over with the plasma cutter and after:

I forgot to take a “before” photo of the hood, but here’s the “after.” You can infer from the patterns on the sheet steel where there was under-hood support before that is now missing. The engine and trunk lids are basically just sheet steel now, as you can probably tell by the way that the hood sags in the photo below. I didn’t have a scale out but I’d bet that we lost at least 10 pounds in this weight removal maneuver. And it bears repeating: the plasma cutter is the coolest tool ever. It’s like cutting metal with a very short light saber. Very, very fun:

Grayson also did a lot of work on Sunday getting the exhaust system all welded together and on the car, but I failed to document his work on that part of the car. Suffice it to say that especially for a first-time exhaust creation, he did a great job. We fitted the exhaust so that it is exiting the car on the driver’s side rear, with a tip (galvanized steel, not coffee-can hooner, although I would love to weld on an actual Folger’s can just for a laugh) directing the sound down and away from the driver.

The last thing that we did on Sunday night before cleaning up the shop and getting the car ready to roll out was to put on this tow bar. There is a fairly good chance that this car will get towed at some point in the race (just on probabilites alone), plus it makes it easier to pull with another truck around the pits, to get onto/off of the trailer, etc. Also, it helps provide a little more protection to the radiator in case someone drops a transmission, engine, or wheel right in front of us on the race course:

Grayson and I finished up and pulled out of the shop around 10:00 on Sunday night. It was a long weekend for me personally, but totally worth it to get the car this far along. There’s still a sight more to do on the car, but the cubic man hours poured into it at this point are really starting to show their value. At the last minute, we added some NASCAR-ready hood hold downs to the front of the car:

Jesse just dropped off the car back at my house and it’s safely in the garage for now. I’m going to order the few remaining parts that we identified over the weekend (kill switch, switch panel, roll cage padding) so that we can get that all taken care of. Next steps to tackle are the re-wire job (including scrapping and replacing the battery leads to the solenoid and starter — Dave, that was the starting problem on Saturday), wiring up the kill switch and switch panel, and then cleaning up the roll cage and spraying it matte black.

We also need to fabricate and mount the cold air intake, modify the engine cover to make room for the diagonal struts, and I’m sure a whole host of other things. But for now, we’re in really good shape. Cheers guys.

MR2, Race Prep Author: Pat