Izzy's Custom Cages

Glen Johnsons Spec Miata was finished up over the weekend and is now getting prepped for it's first outing in full race trim this Wed. evening with the St. Louis Region SCCA's PDX. Enjoy it Glen! Shiney side up! Or should I say somewhat oxidized side up ;)

The finished project is can be found here: 8 point SCCA Spec Miata Rollcage
Here are a few teaser photos:

Passenger Side X and sill Bar

Drivers Side NASCAR style Doorbar

Passenger side roof clearance

As Glen was getting ready to take off in his new racecar, the next car was pulling into the shop. And when I say pulling... I mean we had to pull it manually into the shop. The car is a 1969 Cheverolet Camaro which is undergoing a full "frame-off" restification. The body ... and thats all there is... showed up on the body shops chassis dolley. It will be getting a full 10 point NHRA 4130 cage. The owner is aiming for the 10's in Stock Eliminator. Pictures and updates to follow. We're currently prepping the pad areas for the install and measuring and mocking up the cage.

Since I have zero idea on how to embed a youtube video into these posts like ultra cool cat christoc, you'll have to work for it  

http://www.youtube.com/v/OgUbAu0oPdo

We fabbed up a GT style tow eye for a recent project. .

GT Style Tow Eye extends through the hood. Bolts to the factory shock mounts. Here's the underhood shot.

Jim Easley's Spec Miata project is complete! Look for it to hit the PDX's, track days and ultimately the SCCA Club Race days soon!

More pics of the build here: http://www.izzyscustomcages.com/JESpecMiata.html

Jeef drops off the Honda S2000 for a cage tomorrow.

Where'd the time go? Been so busy lately that I've lost track of what I haven't updated!

The Fox body "Domestic Drifter" project is long gone... unsure whether it's been sliding yet at any of the Midnight Madness events or not... I'll have to get an update!

A new BMW E30 came in for a some work. The track day M3 received a full 8 point road racing cage. We ran into a snag on the seat installs so we're waiting on some new fixed back seats to show up. Also installed some sway bar mount reinforcements on the front struts.

Alex April brought his E30 back in for the passenger side seat install before the STL BMWCCA's June 6th HPDE at GIR.

While we wait on seats for the M3, a Spec Miata is in the shop for an 8 point. So far we have the interior pulled and are prepping the pad area's for the installation.

The "Plan B Racing" team attended the STL SCCA's  June (or was it May?)  PDX and had a great time! The Neon ran well and we continue to knock time off of the clock! We're updating some minor issues involved with the suspension adjustment (mismatched bolt sizes/wrong "crash" bolts left over from it's years of Showroom Stock duty). Once we get those resolved, we're hoping that we'll only have to adjust the camber once/twice a day... instead of every session!

"Plan B" also attended the STL SCCA's first Rallycross of the year at GIR! What a great day!  As a bonus, it was Father's Day and my brother Steve & I  dragged our father Harold with us to play in the dirt (ok, hay). The Sentra SE-R performed great and was flogged unmercifully. After the official competition was over, we were able to get some fun runs in. Ol' Harold showed us youngins a thing or two. For the first time ever in a FWD car at speed... on dirt, I'm thinking he may have given us a run for our money! He hasn't driven a car aggressively on dirt in about 50 years since driving the back roads down in Arkansas in a '38 Packasaurus with a dead cylinder and mechanical brakes!... uphill both ways!

Oh.. the Mitsubishi 3000 GT VR4's cage has been painted... I'll link to some pics here soon.

The "Domestic Drifter" project is done and will be sliding at Midnight Madness soon. The project included a full 6 point cage, jacking pads, driver and passenger seat mounts and a little remounting of the rear watts link mounts/braces. The cage was pretty straightforward. The rear pads were beefed up a little to reinforce the stock shock mounts. The Griggs racing kit converts the stock shock setup into a coil-over setup. The stock upper shock mounts leave much to be desired SO.....

That should carry the loads of

The main hoop pads tie into the lower control arm torque boxes and rocker panels rather than the floor pan.

The jacking pads extend down from the rear hoop pads down to the floorpan to make the constant tire changes associated with drifting a little easier. A section of 1" tube had to be added underneith the floorpan to protect the factory fuel & brake lines. Why Ford placed the fluid lines so close to the likely jacking point is beyond me...

The front pads worked out fairly well and double as jack points

and the topper... the flag mount for the Jolly Roger:

I'll post some pics of the other repairs as they deserve their own post :) Bubble Gum & Duct Tape p.2????

Wrapped up the BMW E30's 4 point rollbar, Recarro seat install, strut bar install and rear sway bar mount reinforcement over the past weekend.

The strut bar install took more time than a prefab bar should take to install. Quite a bit of tweaking was involved in order to get the bar close to fitting. Definitely not a 20 minute R&R job should a motor swap ever be in the future.

A little last minute sway bar reinforcement was added to the list as Alex is planning on upgrading the rear sway bar and the rear mounts are known to fail with the heavier aftermarket bars.

On to the next project! The "Domestic Drifter" project has rolled in and is well underway. The car owner, "Gru" is building the Fox Body Mustang into a Formula D drift car. Rather than building the usual Nissan 240sx or using his very cool Nissan Skyline for track duty, Gru is building a rarity in drift circles.... a domestic! V8 power plus a full on Griggs Racing/Koni coil over suspension.

So far, the pad areas have been prepped, dash removed and the main hoop has been fabbed up. I'll update as we go along.

Alex April's E30 4 point project is just about wrapped up. Took a little longer than I had anticipated, but toss a sick kid and a tax deadline in the mix and progress can get slowed down a tad. Pretty straightforward 4 point with some reinforcement of the shock tower/coil spring mount areas as well as a "strut" bar and a hoop brace diagonal.

 Once again seat mounting has proved itself to be tons o' fun. The old "one step forward 2 steps back" waltz was in full effect as we tried using some Recarro sliders with the stock mounting points and the front 11mmx1.50 studs. Drill the holes a little bigger... that works, slot the rear holes... whoops, the slider is hitting on the stud, spacers for the stud to raise the front of the slider.... ahhhhh now we're located! Mount up the seat for a test fit... adjust a little and measure the position and angle of the seat, get the harness bar location and angle of the shoulder belts, pull the seat back out. After welding the harness bar in and getting everything painted and tidy'd back up, go to reinstall the seats... take a step back, 11x1.50 bolt head isn't going to fit in the rails for the rear bolts, nor will a nut fit on the fronts for the studs ... off to the Grainger down off of S. Hanley and grab some socket head bolts... heads still look fairly large, but can deal with that easily enough. Back in the shop, cut off the factory studs, centerpunch, then drill out the heads. No real access to the bottom sides, so extend the hole through the seat mounts crossmember. Make up a  2"x.125" washer as a backing plate on the outer mount (inner mount was ok with a normal fender washer, outer mount had another hole w/i .25" of the new bolt hole). New 3" g8 bolts and locknuts in the front holes... a little grassroots lathe work (mix one drill and a belt sander and use your imagination) on the socket head bolts and the rears were installed. Check the bottom sides for any issues... threads are too long on outside and is rubbing on the fuel line.... couldn't possibly be any future issues there right? Bolt comes back out, run a die onto the bolt, cut the hardened bolt, round off the cut, re-cut the threads with the die and viola!!!!! Drivers seat is ready to bolt in! Now for the passenger seat! Oh... ebay sliders shipping were delayed... good, I'm tired of seats!

On to the strut bar and then the rear sway bar bracket mounts. 

Just putting this someplace that's easy for me to access.

GIR Track Days/Races 

April 16 SCCA PDX Precision Driving Xperience, Wednesday,, 4 pm - Dark, register on www.DLBRacing.com 

April 26-27, NASA Race & HPDE, Gateway International, Madison, IL (http://racenasa.nasamidwest.com/) 

May 7 St. Louis Region SCCA PDX Wed Night 3p-dark

May 21 St. Louis Region SCCA PDX Wed Night 3p-dark

May 24, St. Louis Region SCCA PDX Saturday ALL DAY

June 6-8, St. Louis BMW CCA DE, 

June 13th, 14th     -    Impala Club, ("HPDE")

August 2-3 SCCA Regional Race / IT, Gateway International, Madison, IL 

September 26-27 St Louis Region PCA DE (http://www.stlpca.org/CarreraClassic/tabid/61/Default.aspx ) 

October 19, St. Louis Region SCCA PDX

October 25-26 SCCA Regional Race / IT

October 31-November 2 St. Louis BMW CCA DE

The Mitsubishi 3000 GT VR4 has headed back north to Iowa. Won't be long and it'll be tearing up the track in NASA's TTR class.

"Izzy" earned his keep while we were loading the car up. Apparently the 3K GT's are fairly wired together and the windows wouldn't roll up with the dash out of the car (owner still had some rewiring to do under the dash, so it wasn't reinstalled during the cage build), but the locks work... We were able to hot wire the windows and proceeded to close the doors... with them locked and the keys in it. Luckily the hatch was still open... although there was no way any of us were going to be able to snake our way through the cage to get to the key or the door handles... "Izzy" to the rescue. The cage was truly a jungle gym and he had a great time snaking his way to the door to pop it open! I'll have to see if we were able to get pics of that one.

The dust had barely settled after sweeping the shop out when the next project rolled in. Another E30 4 pointer. This should be a quick one with a Fox body Mustang drift car coming in on the 18th.

Seat brackets are finished up but still floating until the floorpan mods are complete and double checked for clearance.
All Cleko'd up:

Welded:
Test Fit:


A few of the gussets in progress:

Big progress coming up this week as I'll be putting two full days in and the owner will be picking up the car this weekend.

Next up is another 4 point in a BMW E30.

It seems in racing, there's always a plan of attack, then there's Plan B for when things don't quite go as planned.

This past weekend at GIR was the first road race of the year for Plan "B" Racing. We made some pretty big changes to the Neon this winter - hopefully to be more competitive than the previous 4 years in SSC and ITA:

Performance Driven Springs all around
New through the dash custom 8 point safety cage from Izzy’s Custom Cages
New Bultler Built Racing Seat 
Polyurethane Bushings from Energy Suspension/Modern Performance
Spherical bearings in front control arms
New Hubs, bearings and rotors
New exhaust system: header, Purple Hornie(!) muffler, and custom side exhaust
New CAI
MSD coil pack and Magnacore spark plug wires
New mirror locations
New Tach
New Steering Wheel
New Window Net mount and Safety Solutions Right Side Net
FireCharger 5 lb fire suppression system
4 wheel alignment getting maximum camber all around
LongAcre Hot Lap timer 

We really had no idea what to expect out of the car when we finally got it to the track. We were hoping that the massive understeer problem had been addressed with the some of the modifications to the suspension, but we hope we didn’t go too far. Just to add a little flavor to the unknown mix, it poured down rain at Gateway International Raceway Thursday night prior to the event which delayed loading the car up. So, we weren't able to get to the track until Friday afternoon and pretty much missed the whole T&T day.

Steve didn’t get a whole lot of sleep Friday night but was excited and ready for Saturday. With the new springs, we decided to back the Konis off to the medium position in an effort to control things a little bit and give us a middle of the road setup, set the tire pressures on the Toyo RA1's to 35 all around and planned on running 5 laps, then come in for temps and pressure readings just to see where we were.

As Steve headed out onto the track and began working some heat in the tires, he could tell immediately that the car was rotating very well. BUT, what is that noise? Turns out the exhaust tip worked loose and was dragging the ground on right hand turns. Back to the hot pits for Scott to fix the problem and head back out. Another first, having a “pit crew “ on pit road and not having to drive back to the paddock.

For anyone that hasn't run GIR, turn 6 is deceptively tough as a decreasing radius and we've had a lot of difficulty with it in the past. The Neon would just plow the front end through the corner no matter what we attempted. With the new suspension, the car is totally different. Steve was able to make the car rotate with either throttle/brake/steering input. He played with all 3 for the first 5 laps and then came in for the tire temps and pressure check. Pressures were good, but tire temps in the front are all over the place. WAY to much camber on Drivers front as we had nearly a 50 degree range across the tire. Pass. front was w/i 15 degrees. The back tires were very even (especially since they're just along to serve as weight . 

Steve went back out and got back in the rhythm of driving again and running with a couple of other ITA cars, getting faster and faster, experimenting with lines and such, when he came off of turn 7 (hairpin turn onto NASCAR oval) and saw what looked like an alternator in the racing line. He moved out to the right of it so the guys behind him can see it as well, glanced in his left mirror in order to move back into the groove when BAM! something hit the right front underside of the car really hard scaring the Bejeezus out of him. We later found out that the hit was so hard that the video camera skipped during the recording. Having already passed the pit road lane, he pulled down on the inside and used the pace car escape lane and everything seemed fine. Back in the paddock we began looking it over. We crawled all over the car and only saw one little shiny area on the right control arm where something might have hit it. On closer inspection, the tie down hole in the subframe is now concave instead of convex, so whatever it was that Steve hit bent that area a lot, but didn’t affect the overall shape of the frame. We don’t know if that caused the camber to go away as well, but basically we went from ~2.5 deg to 0 deg of camber. Turns out that it was indeed an alternator laying on the track and Steve aparently hit the alternator bracket.

Qualifying wasn’t quite what we were hoping for as Steve was 8th out of 9 drivers in the class but he felt pretty comfortable in the car. At the start of the race he got a decent start and passed a couple of  ITA cars and got into a pretty decent battle with an ITR Mustang for about half a lap, but then he had an off and never saw him again. After that he had a great time battling an ITA Miata for probably 8-10 laps of side by side, on your bumper, filling your mirror type clean racing. Steve passed the Miata once and then missed a shift a few laps later and the Miata regained the position. With only a few laps remaining Steve managed to squeak by him again for the position. Ended up 4th out of 9 in ITA and was pretty happy.

The important part was that now the car does not have the understeer that it used to have, which means we are heading in the right direction.

Stay tuned for Sundays recap and some video.

The cage progress on the Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4 was going like gangbusters... til we got to the seats and somebody tossed the anchor overboard

I hate seats... why can't we just strap ourselves to the floors and call it good?

Actually, the seat installs (yes installS... there's two of them :blech:) are going fairly well. The Sparco seats are going to be attached to a framework off of the cage itself rather than bolting to the floor.

I'm making them adjustable, but only for initial fitting. The owner is based out of Iowa, so we'll be fitting the seats to him when he comes to pick the car up, possibly next week. If all goes right, we'll play with the angle, play with the fore/aft placement, tack the seat brackets in place, pull the seat(s) and finish up the welds.

The factory seat brackets had to be removed in order to get the seat as low as possible. The floorpan/tranny tunnel has been extensively massaged (read, cut) to make room for the seats and framework. I became reintroduced to the beauty of the air hammer with the right fitting.

The cutting chisel was a god send. I discovered the spot weld cutter a little late in the project, but it worked very well. The only downside to the air hammer is that things can (and do) go wrong quickly The 3000GT actually has a floor and subfloor throughout most of the cabin. This is making things a little interesting, especially for reforming the floorpan... but that's for next week.

1 3/8" tube was used for the framework with 1.75" tube split to form collars that the brackets weld to. This will allow us to move the collars along the frame for final fitting. 

On the Neon front... we're racing this weekend! We'd hoped to do the T&T, but it just wasn't in the cards today. Almost 1pm before we had the car unloaded and the paddock area set up for the weekend. Steve may have run a couple of sessions, but I missed out as I had to be at my real job @ 2p. 

Good progress on the Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4 the past couple of days...

I had a glass company come out and remove the front windshield for the A pillar gussets and dash bar installation. WOW is it easy with the windshield gone. I really should start doing that for every cage, but probably wont except on special occasions like this. I'll be calling them back out to remove the rear hatch glass and probably install the Percy's Lexan Kit that the owner bought.

Rear X is complete.

7th & 8th points are complete.

The body gusseting plates are formed although I'm waiting on a 1" dimple die to get here to complete the gussets. I just got the cage too tight to the body to use my 1.5" or 1.75" die sets Lateral bars are already tied into the A pillar in a couple of spots as I was able to get the fit pretty tight. The rest will be connected with the stamped gussets.

Dash bar is in and will tie into the factory cross beam with a dimpled gusset.

The sill bars and main door bars are welded in and the bisected bars for the X will get welded in tonight.

Once the X's get finished, the pads will finally get tied into the chassis, as I wont need to move anything around anymore. Been looking forward to that moment for some time as that's the major turning point in every cage project.

Once the pads are tied in, the diagonal will go in followed by a bar that will tie into the tranny tunnel and will be the support bar for the seat/harness mount frames.

For more pics: 3000 GT VR4

On the Neon front, car was teched today and other than some brake lights that aren't working... no major problems! Still waiting on some vinyl from some sponsors and then the new look is complete. We'll have the car at the friday Test & Tune and will see how the new springs, spherical bearings, poly bushings, cage, rear bar, intake, and header/exhaust have changed the car! Only one week away!

Updated pics! ITA Neon