Building a Roadster
The following pictures document the progress of building the Roadster from assembling the chassis to polishing the body work. Click on the pictures to enlarge them.
June 1997 - The chassis is pretty much laid out and tacked together. Notice the wheels and bodywork in the background - they later ended up on the car.
Unfortunately I did not take many pictures of the chassis going together!
September 1998 - at this point the chassis has been completely welded together. The front and rear control arms were fabricated and assembled onto the chassis making it a roller.
1999 is when I bought my house, so the Roadster was on the back burner most of that year.
March 2000 - Here is a picture of the rear independent suspension. The differential, half shafts, hubs, uprights, and brakes are all from a Ford Thunderbird. The aluminum differential houses a 8.8 inch 3.27 to 1 Traction Loc.
March 2000 - Here is the front of the car. The powerplant is a 1995 Mustang GT 5.0 liter V8 connected to a Borg Warner T5 transmission.
March 2000 - Front suspension. I used the 1994 Mustang front spindle with a billet steel adapter to replace the Mustang's strut with an upper control arm. The control arms are fabricated from 1" stainless steel tubing and use Chrysler ball joints.
April 2000 - The car is finally ready to move under it's own power! At this point I have not yet built a gas tank, so a 5 gallon gas can is used. There is also no exhaust system.
April 2000 - My very own V8 go-cart! It was a ball to drive for the first time. Suddenly the work throughout the previous 3 years seemed to be justified! Without any body work the car was light enough that you could get the thing fish-tailing in third gear with just a little throttle.
April 2000 - The 5 gallon gas can didn't seem very safe so I decided to fabricate one out of aluminum. The strange shape gives me a 14.5 gallon capacity and does a great job of not sucking air even when approaching empty.
July 2000 - Assembling the body panels.
July 2000 - The inner trunk panels actually call out the location of the body in the back. Here they are being fitted.
July 2000 - The body is now pretty much fit to the car. I decided not to bond it in place until after I had driven the car some and knew I wouldn't have to take it back off to change something.
August 2000 - The car is now being driven! It had no interior except for seats, and the body was held in place by a few screws and some silicone. It rattled like a rolling scrap metal bin, but was nice to finally have it licensed and on the road. It stayed like this about 1 year during which time I managed to put around 3000 miles on it.
August 2001 - I have removed the engine so that heat shielding can be installed on the firewall and the tranny tunnel. Did I mention how hot the car was without insulation???
September 2001 - Now the body has been removed to concentrate on smoothing out the weld seams.
September 2001 - I started to think about polishing the body instead of painting it... At this point the body is back on the car and totally bonded into place with aircraft adhesive.
October 2001 - I decided to actually let someone else do the interior. Tony is a master when it comes to fitting leather to car parts! He sewed 5 different pieces of leather together then stretched it over the dash - and not a single wrinkle!
October 2001 - Here is the leather sewn together but not yet stretched over the dash.
October 2001 - Here is the dash finished.
October 2001 - The car is basically finished at this point