The Process, Part 2

Okay, so we have decided on the car and we know which class or classes we want to run, and we know what’s legal and what isn’t, right? So now can we please start the shopping spree? Well, no, not yet.

It’s time to really start looking at the car we have, our subject. Have you decided on an older car, something classic perhaps, or do you want to go with something newer? Either way you need to do a full evaluation of the car and what it really needs to be a safe and reliable car first. Safety and reliability are going to be your two most important outcomes from your build. The reason for that is that, again, the part that will slow you down the most is between your ears. Having confidence in the safety of the car will make you a more confident driver, and having a reliable car will allow you to spend time learning to drive it rather than trying to figure out why there is oil all over everything or why magic smoke is wisping out from under your dashboard.

If you have a newer car as your starting point you won’t need to worry too much about rust and body damage, but if the car is older you definately want to look for these things. Rust can weaken the structure of the car and render it useless in it’s worst cases and in other cases it can at a minimum create more expense to patch holes and create more work for your cage builder or fab guy. So look for these things and be ready to address them.

You also need to decide just how gung-ho you are on this build. When I am building a car for a client I always advocate for a complete disassembly. This means down to the tub, engine out, subframes off, suspension completely off, all interior panels and wiring completely out of the car. This is part of what I call preparing the chassis. Chassis prep can include rust-repair, undercoating removal, seam sealer and noise deadening removal, and patching unwanted holes in the floor or firewall areas. All of these things are easiest to perform before the cage is built. One thing you will quickly realize about roll cages is that not only are they 100% necessary for safety and a critical part of the car’s design in terms of rigidity, but they also just flat get in the way all the time.

So, before the car goes to hard-fab for a cage installation, you need to do the chassis prep. You need to decide what you are going to do with all the interior bits that aren’t going back on the car. You can try to sell them, I prefer to get rid of them asap, give them away and if that doesn’t work unfortunately they are going to the landfill. This is carpet, door cards, underlayment for the carpet, all of that. Out and off of the car.

Now once you have removed all of the mechanical bits, and the interior, this is when I would recommend removing the wiring harness. This is not for the timid. Use some masking tape or labels and write yourself notes that you will understand later on, about where parts of the harness lay in the car and what they attach to.

Also, please take your time with the electrical connectors when you are unplugging things. Many connectors become a lot easier to un-latch if you actually put pressure on them, pushing them ON to the device, not pulling on them. Pulling on them often makes the latch harder to remove, so in order Push the connector on, Squeeze the tab, then pull it off. Don’t get impatient, take your time, don’t break the tabs. Electrical failures are a VERY common cause of DNF (did not finish) on amateur racing cars. Broken electrical connectors are VERY common causes to electrical failures. So while you may want to hurry it up at the moment, you will regret it if your engine dies in the middle of your fast lap of the weekend because you broke the tabs off of your coil-pack connector. Be Patient!

Now you have everything off of the car, it’s “down to the tub”, what is next? Well, now you can start really working on the chassis. You can grind, weld, scrape, and drill without worrying about damaging expensive wiring or perforating your fuel tank. This is the time when you will want to deal with rust first, then move on to cleaning up and lightening the chassis by removing sound deadening, undercoating, and seam sealer. I’ll quickly go through some methods for accomplishing these tasks. But, first, realize that you are also helping the cage builder at this point. You don’t want all of these nasty materials catching fire every time you try to weld on the car, and they will. If you don’t remove the undercoating before you try to build the cage foot boxes, that stuff is going to catch fire. Not everyone does this, but I can say that you will eventually be looking for 10 more lbs. of weight to come off of the car and there is at least 10lbs of undercoating, seam sealer, and sound deadening on most any car.

Undercoating and Seam Sealer: I use a tool called a Crud Thug from Snap-on to remove most of the undercoating, it’s basically a wire brush on a belt, it’s amazing, Eastwood has a version of the same tools as well, this thing will straight rip right through undercoating and seam sealer. It is air-powered, however, and it uses a LOT of air, so if you have just a small air compressor it might be time to upgrade the compressor. Yeah, still premature on buying all of those trick go fast parts, you are going to need TOOLS. Super pimp shocks are beautiful, but completely useless until you have a car ready for track set-up. Other tools that work well are an electric grinder with a heavy duty wire brush cup mounted to it, and a propane torch. Sometimes you have some material that just needs to be turned to carbon and scraped off, it’s the only way to reach it.

Sound Deadening: This is the black tar stuff that is basically glued to your floor pans and inside your doors and trunk lid and all over the place. This stuff is NASTY, and it’s heavy as hell, it’s a thick layer of tar. It’s also flammable and on the interior of your car, do you really want that riding around with you on track? There are a couple of effective methods for dealing with this stuff. Both of them involve moving the material out of it’s normal temperature range. The first method is using dry ice to get the tar really cold and make it brittle. Once you cover it with dry ice you can often just smack it with a hammer and it’ll pop off of the surface, you might need a flat blade scraper as well to get underneath it and help peel it up. The other method, and the one that I most often find myself using, is heat. I use a propane torch to warm the stuff up so that I can then get a flat scraper under it and it just peels right up. You need to not get it too hot, then it gets even more sticky and gooey and messy. It takes a little bit of experimentation to learn just the right amount of heat to make this effective, but I find this method to be the most convenient for me. You want to run the torch over the sound deadening until you just see the surface start to glisten a little bit and maybe a few bubbles. That is when it is soft enough to peel up, but not so soft that it becomes a sticky mess. The good news is, if you do get it too hot, just stop and wait for it to cool down a bit and try again.

After you have removed sound deadening, undercoating, and seam sealer, you may need to hit some areas with primer to keep them from rusting, consider a weldable primer perhaps. But you will also want to really inspect the chassis, look for cracks in the metal, broken spot welds, and bent or damaged areas in the tub. This will also be the time to permanently close up any holes that you know you will not be using on the completed car. AC pass through holes on the firewall perhaps, extra holes in the floors and trunk area, just take a good look over the car and come up with a plan to close up these holes. I often cut out aluminum panels and rivet them into place. This helps with fire safety as well as keeping fumes and liquids away from the driver.

As you can see there is a TON of work to do and we haven’t even gotten any “race car parts” yet. Just getting the tub ready for the cage to go in. Next we can discuss the process of getting or building a cage and things that you will want to consider during this process. Do you have any questions or comments?