Body - Side Mirrors

I purchased some side mirrors from Squeak Bell via Trademe. Squeak used to own Kiwi Konnection in the US. They build Hot Rod chassis and some of them make their way back here to NZ. As it turns out Squeak had a few parts left over from a build he'd done for a customer and these bits were things that the customer had changed their mind on. Changing your mind like that is one of those things that happens all the time on a hot rod build, but if you can avoid it by having a good plan it really does pay off. Every time you change your mind you shell out more cash and you lose a lot when you go to try and on sell the unused bits.

These mirrors are a classic case. They retail for about $146 US so that is the best part of $200 in Kiwi cash. I picked them up for about a quarter of that. My gain this time I guess....but I'm sure my turn will come when I am the one on the losing end.

Anyway as many of you know, to say I like my gadgets is a bit of an understatement and in case you haven't already guessed from my blogs about the climate aircon......I intend to have a few mod cons on this rod.

So I decided the mirrors will be electric.

I have been scavenging at Pick a Part to try and find some nice small motors that will fit into these new side mirrors. The glass is only just over 2 inches tall at the widest point so they are fairly small and finding a motor that will fit inside this space has proven to be a real big ask.

I must have popped the glass out more than fifty different side mirrors before I came across something small enough.

In the end these mirrors from a Ford Focus have become the donors.

Now we are about to find out how an electric mirror works. I bet you have been laying awake at nights just wondering how they move in all directions at the touch of a button.

First I pop the mirror out.

As you can see it is just glued to a plastic backing and that plastic backing clips into a ring around the electric mirror motor. That's the motor you can see in the second picture above.

Here it is pulled out of the housing. It is held in place by 3 screws.

The white strip going across diagonally is the pivot and the black things either side are the motors. At the end of each motor is a white plastic stem. You can see a closer pic of one of these below.

The stem has small teeth and the motor has a cog on the end of it, so when the motor turns over it pushes this stem out or pulls it in depending on which direction it is turning.

The stem itself is connected to the outer plastic ring around the motors so it pushes and pulls the ring in and out.

Because the white plastic pivot bar runs diagonally between these two motors and stems it means the push pull action of the upper motor pivots the ring left and right.

The bottom motor pushes and pulls to pivot the ring up and down. Both motors can operate to get all the various positions in between. Easy as that.

There are 3 wires coming out of the 2 motors. The blue wire is common to both motors and the yellow belongs to the top (left/right motor) while the orange belongs to the bottom (up/down) motor.

When a power supply goes onto the yellow wire and the blue wire is earthed the top motor cranks outwards.

When polarity is reversed (power to the blue wire and earthed yellow wire) the motor cranks back in again. The same thing applies to the orange wire for the bottom motor.

So when you push your power mirror buttons that is in effect what you are doing and what is going on in side that side mirror.


Now you may also have noticed in an earlier picture when I popped the mirror out that there were some wires hanging out of the glass. These are a bit of a bonus.....they belong to the heaters inside the mirrors......heh, heh, I'm like a pig in shit now......not only will the mirrors be electric they will be heated too. This is an absolutely critical piece of technology as I will need these when I get the car on the road and go on the snow run at Ruapehu. These little heaters will thaw the mirrors so I have good visibility even at below zero degree conditions.

 Okay so how do the heaters work?

First you have to get the glass out. No mean feat as it is bloody near superglued in place. Breaking it away bit by bit required a bit of care and I decided to wear me safetys! Not just because I look so damn good in them, but also because bits fly everywhere.

If there is one thing I learned when I built my last rod.......it is......."if you think something could go wrong here and I shouldn't really be doing this".......then don't as sure as hell, it will go wrong. Just ask me about the angle grinder and my jandal's one day.

Anyway once the glass is peeled away, this is what you see. A small thin sheet of plastic that incorporates the heater element.

Flip that over and peel away the other side of the sticky stuff and you can see the heater element.

Each wire goes to a metal filament that winds its way across the plastic sheet (bit like a kids...."Help Bugs Bunny find his way to the carrots"......puzzle). Neither of these filaments actually touch at any point but the black material between does conduct power between the two circuits but with some resistance. It is this resistance that generates heat. Voila heated mirrors.

Now the interesting point is that because the the silver circuits don't actually meet anywhere I can effectively cut them off and the heater will still work. I just need to be sure to cut the pad to length by cutting vertically rather than cutting horizontally across the heater pad.

So its not a perfect fit but it will heat the centre of the mirror and the heat will transmit through the glass over time as well. You can see in the second pic roughly how the pad will sit. This pad will be for the drivers side though so the black side will face toward us and the silver circuits and wires will go in behind.

In the pic below you can see how the mirrors come from the manufacturer. So how do we make all that electric stuff fit inside the small mirror body. First I'll pull out the manual pivoting face that comes with the mirrors. Normally you'd mount the glass on the pivoting face once the body has been painted to match the car, so they come with the mirrors not yet glued in.

Now that this is out we can see how much......actually how little space we have to work with.

Ooops kinda like a round peg in a square hole! No panic though, I carefully selected these motors with a view to cutting them down.....here's one I prepared earlier!

And now, screwed into place.

You will remember then that the original mirror had a plastic backing that clipped onto the motor. Then that had the heater pad stuck to it.....then the mirrors was stuck to that.

Fairly easy except I will glue mine in rather than clip them, I will use silicone so if ever a glass should break I should be able to ease it away with a bit of effort.

BUT!!!!!! One last improvement. You see these mirrors are so small you can't see much out of them, so I am going to put convex lenses in to give a better view.

The problem with that though is how do you stick a curved mirror on a flat mounting? Well as luck would have it the mounting pad that came with the mirrors is curved on its back face and wouldn't you know it, it fits perfectly (well with a bit of filing it does) to the shape of the new mirror lenses.

All I need to do now is get a glass expert to cut the glass to shape.

This is about as far as I can go for now with these as I can't assemble the mirrors until we can fit them to the body and can paint them to match the car. Then all the components get screwed and glued into place before wiring up to switches to operate them....but that is another story for another day!









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General - Response from TAC (Technical Advisory Committee)

Just this last week I had the official word from the TAC (Technical Advisory Committee).

Unfortunately the response to my application to be able to run two body styles on the one chassis platform has been declined.

There were three main reasons;

1. A body style must be noted on the registration and on the certification documentation but there is no provision for noting two styles of body for either of these, i.e. the system does not cater for this.
2. There are a number of components that would be specific to each body such as door latches and hinges, glass, wipers, eye level brake light, other lights (tail lights and brake lights), seat belts and seat belt mounts, seats and seat mounts. These all form part of checks formed as part of the cert process and of the Warrant of Fitness process. Obviously if one warrant is obtained then these components would not have been checked on the other body for condition, specification and safety. In addition to this there are two key elements, the steering column and the brake pedal that would be affected when the body changed over and these needed to be safe but there is no provision for a check to occur of these components after changing the body.
3. Last but not least it sets a really ugly precedence that could be interpreted with more radical changes by others if this one were allowed.

I totally get it and as you know from my last blog I was kind of thinking the same thing. The only thing that could change it for me would be if mass produced cars started coming out with such an option, which could happen. I have heard that Smart Cars are looking at a body that can be switched between coupe, sedan and ute.  If these existed now in NZ, I would possibly have had a better case.

So in short, the coupe it is! That burning desire to have a Tudor as well will just have to go on hold for a while. That said its nice to be able to progress without having to worry about making things fit for a changing body style. A whole lot easier!

General - Big change but still on track

There has been a lot happening since I last posted and its fair to say I have put off posting until I had made a few decisions and had a few answers I could share with you.

You will recall that the original intent was to build a Tudor (a sedan shaped car but with 2 doors - hence the play on words - Two Door / Tudor). The plan was that it would look something like this. 

 In fact the blog was even called Flaming Tudor. You may also recall though that the idea was to make the the body removable so I could interchange it with a Coupe body as well. I still haven't heard if I'm going to be allowed to do that or not but the more I think about it, I doubt the idea will fly......and that got me thinking......you see I have always wanted to have another Coupe and the Tudor was kind of an added bonus. If I can't do the two body thing then what would I really prefer? I have to say it is a Coupe.

The Coupe was always going to be a fenderless version and my original thinking was build the Tudor, that will be the harder car to build as there is more to it and that way the change to a fenderless Coupe should be a relatively easy one. I was wrong though, there is more to building the fenderless car as more is exposed and on view. You can hide a multitude of sins with those guards and running boards.

So the big change is.........the Coupe will come first!

The other big decision I have had to make is whether or not to redo the whole front end of the chassis that Juniors Kustom Rides have just finished installing. Why would I want to do that you ask??? 

Well I had never given it a lot of thought but I have found out since that work was done, that when you build a fenderless hot rod the front chassis rails stick out like this car below. You can see the ends of the chassis rails protruding with the headlights mounted to them.

This is okay on a traditional looking rod but on a more modern looking rod like I envisage you'd normally do what they call pinching the chassis. In effect it is bringing the rails closer together at the front and as a result having them line up with and hidden by the bonnet. The end result is they are hidden and don't stick out, so you get a cleaner look like this.

Does it look cleaner? Yes.....

Does it look better? Hmmmm dunno.

Does it look okay not pinched? Yeah I think it does.

Is it worth redoing the whole front end again at great expense? This is the most difficult one to answer. This is because if I want to do this it is never going to be easier or cheaper than doing it right now.

So how do you decide? I decided to mock up a picture of the car and to draw in the protruding chassis rails to see what it will look like. So that's exactly what I have now done.... now you can consider yourselves very lucky......in fact.......the privileged few. You are the first to see this mocked up drawing of what the car will look like. 

Do the protruding chassis rails look okay? Yeah I reckon they do especially if I mount the headlights on them. Let me know what you think.

A lot of work to get to this from a standard 33 Ford Coupe. It is significantly chopped which means height is taken from the pillars that support the roof. In this case more height has been taken from the front pillars than the rear ones, so you get that real "raked" look. Also if you compare it to the picture of the original car below you can see that the windscreen has been angled back to give it a more modern stance.

In addition to "raking" the top of the car I will also be exaggerating the rake by angling the body itself. This is achieved by lifting the floor of the car upwards so that the chassis tucks further up under the body. This is known as channeling. Again more in the front than the back, which will angle the body forward.

All this Chopping and Channeling has an impact though as the roof is lower and the floor is higher in the car. Guess what that does for head room.... yep you guessed it.... not much. The seats will be damn near set on the floor. Can you imagine that though.... a 300hp V8 bolted to a chassis that carries a wee bit of fibreglass and its occupants who are sitting on the floor. It should be like riding in a go kart. I can't wait!!!!!

Anyway compare it to the picture of a standard 3 window coupe. Pretty radical change huh! Traditionalists will hate this, but i have the philosophy that a hot rod should be what the owner wants it to be and this is what I like the look of. If you don't like it go and build your own one!

Fuel Injection - Pump and Surge Tank

Below is a link on Youtube that really explains quite well how Fuel Injection works. Its a shame the engine being used as an example is so filthy but you still get a very good idea on just how EFI (Electronic Fuel Injection) works. The guy himself is a real hard case. You can even hear him having a good old scratch part way through the video..... no I don't wanna know what he was scratching...... and if you can make it through the 9 minutes or so to the very end, you will be treated to an awesome laugh. Kinda funny and scary at the same time but a good explanation all the same.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i00j6lJgRLs

This next link shows how a carburetor works. Its for an aircraft but works the same on a car. Sorry about the singing intro but it is a very good explanation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BYm0HnLGRU

Now because I am using the Lexus V8 which is of course fuel injected, I am going to need something a little more elaborate when it comes to the fuel tank and the fuel pump. This is because if I had a carburetored engine, a carb doesn't need a lot of fuel pressure, just enough to get fuel from the tank to the carburetor which has its own little reserve tanks of fuel up at the engine (the float chamber). The engine then basically sucks the fuel in that it needs. Another point to note is that if your fuel tank is nearing empty and you go round a sharp corner and the pump sucks a big gulp of air, it doesn't matter as the carb still has its own small supply of fuel it can use while it waits for the pump to send more fuel along.

With an EFI engine though the fuel is sent straight to the injectors and they need a constant supply of high pressure fuel. This means you need a high pressure pump and it also means you can't ever have the pump sucking air. If it did you would get a big gulp of air at the injectors and no petrol would go into the engine so the engine would cut out. To avoid this in EFI cars they have a surge tank which ensures the fuel pump always has a supply of fuel around its intake tube, even when you are going round corners.

So for me with my build it means I can still use an old style 1934 Ford tank but I will need to put a hi pressure pump into it and I'll have to install a surge tank for it to sit in.

To achieve this I have today been in and bought a fuel tank from a turbo charged Toyota Celica GT4. The pump in this tank will deliver enough fuel volume to the engine. Also the tank will have a surge tank in the bottom of it. I'll just need to cut these components out and install them into a tank that suits the 34 Chassis both in terms of install and perhaps not quite so ugly as this one.

Anyway, here's the tank I purchased today.




There are three circular plates on top of the tank. The top one is the breather pipe that allows the tank to breath as the pressure changes inside the tank depending on the temperature. Obviously on a hot day the fuel and air in the tank expands and that needs to go somewhere, hence a breather.

The second plate to the right is the fuel level sender unit. This is basically a float on an arm that operates an electronic rheostat that varies the signal (amount of current) being sent to the fuel gauge you read on your dashboard. As the arm goes up, more current goes to your gauge and the needle goes up to full. As the tank drains the float drops down and more resistance is applied in the rheostat so less current is sent to your fuel gauge and the needle on the gauge drops closer to empty. We'll look at the float inside the tank in a picture below.

Lastly the big plate has the pump under it and the pipe that carries the fuel from the pump to the engine is coming out of it on the right. The other pipe to the left is the return pipe, this returns fuel that was unused by the injectors. This allows the fuel circuit to run a constant pressure regardless of how much the injectors are or aren't using. Any surplus fuel comes back to the tank to be picked up by the pump once again.

Lets have a look inside.



This is the pump (laying on its side). The pump itself is the cylinder to the left in the photo. It sucks fuel through the nylon "sock" that is at the top left of the picture (the squarish white thing). You can see the fuel pipe coming out of the pump and going up through the mounting plate we looked at from the outside in the last picture.

Also you can see the return pipe coming back into the tank. It has an open end with a "hockey stick" bend at the end.


Last but not least here is a view inside the tank looking into the surge tank. That's the white plastic bin. In effect this is always full of fuel and ensures the pump doesn't suck air even when going round corners or braking heavily, so the injectors have a constant supply of fuel.

Also to the right of the surge tank in this pic you can just make out a black cylinder lying on its side in the fuel. This is the float for the fuel level sender and it moves up and down and in turn raises and lowers the arm attached to it. This then operates the rheostat I mentioned earlier to vary the current that goes to the fuel gauge. The rheostat is inside the cream coloured plastic box to the top right of the photo.

So there you have it the reason I needed an EFI tank and pump and the basics of fuel injection explained.

I think I'll go and have a cup of tea and a lie down now.

Body - Choice between Steel or Fibreglass

I had to go to Nelson for work this week so I took the chance while I was staying over night to go and see Steve at a place known as Rusty Acres on Tuesday evening. Its just 5 minutes out of town at a settlement called Hope and is quite well known to those in Hot Rod circles. Steve has collected up all these cars and a lot of oil company memorabilia. I guess it is all quite valuable stuff but only if you want it and only once restored. You can't help wondering how many if any of the cars will ever see the road again.

Well worth the look anyway and I was keen to see the Tudor he has been advertising on Trademe for a while.



You can see the tudor I have come to see at the front right of this next picture.


He definitely had some cool stuff there, including this old original stockcar. All of it is going to have to be sold apparently as he and his wife have separated and the property is being sold.



Anyway this is what I went to see, its an original 1930's steel Tudor body. Quite cool when you see an old car like this. The guys that built this will most likely be long dead yet the car lives on.... well sort of lives on. It was every bit as bad as I thought it would be. Not exactly what you'd call a good find. Its about as rough as they get before you bulldoze them into the ground.













As you can see its a bit rough round the edges..... actually its a bit rough in between as well..... no its probably worse that that.... it's fair to say it's farked! In this case I'm gonna have to say no I'm sorry.

I am still not going to right off the idea of steel but fibreglass is still really at the top of the list. There are several reasons why I'm not too keen on steel, namely, you need space to bring something like this back from the dead as it will require a lot of panel beating, welding and grinding. This brings me to the next major stumbling block. I am not a skilled panel beater or welder, so you have to pay someone. A body like this would cost about $30k to restore. On top of that, even when its finished its a steel car and I'd have to question.... do you ever really get rid of the rust? I suspect not.

On the other hand with fibreglass, you order it, they ship it, you bolt it on and you drive it. Okay not quite that simple but damn near.

Never say never though as steel is far more desirable from a resale value point of view and if a decent body turned up, perhaps it would be foolish to say no.

Aircon - More Wiring

The wiring saga continues. The upside is I am learning heaps....but its fair to say I am coming across a few obstacles. One such obstacle was the Fuse and Relay board that has a few plugs going into it. Unfortunately it is not clear from an external inspection as to where the wires go or what relationship they have to the various fuses and relays. So there is only one thing for it. Take a look inside one.....



This is a spare fuse board and relay panel that I got from an identical car (Thanks Garry once again). You can see here I have pruned all the wires back so I can see what I am doing. I will now pull it apart to see what goes on inside.



You can see here what the internals are like. Holy shit!

Nah its not that bad. In essence each of the silver strips you see weaving around on these boards is like a wire. It carries current from one area to another and is separated from all the other silver strips. Kind of a network of circuits taking current from fuses to relays and plugs. The three centre boards you see here are double sided and yes they do all come from inside that one panel! On some of these boards you might see a tab sticking up (remember you can double click on the pictures to make them bigger). These tabs go through one or more of the other boards to connect with components on different levels.

It takes a bit of tracing but it is quite logical if you take your time.


You can see here I have marked one of the circuits in red. Its kinda like those kids games where you have to find your way out of a maze. The difference being this one is three dimensional with multiple layers.


It is quite rewarding to be able to extract more and more circuits that won't be needed and now that I can see where things are going I can determine if they are important to what I am doing or not. Piece of cake really.

WHAT IS A RELAY
It just occurred to me that there might be a few reading this Blog that don't know what a relay does. In essence it is a small box that acts kind of like a switch. You see many of the switches in your car like wipers, headlights, horn, heater etc just aren't designed to carry the amount of power needed to make these components work. They would just burn out. So to get around this, the switch you turn on for these components doesn't actually carry much current at all. It is just enough to activate an electromagnet inside the relay which simply pulls a bridge across in the main power feed to the Headlights for example. That way all your headlight switch has done is provide enough current to activate the electromagnet, which then bridges the circuit for your headlights so that they can draw the power they need straight from the battery.

Take a look at this video on Youtube. It explains it really well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz4X5umfNkQ&feature=related

ENGINE WIRING
Phil sent me a pic during the week to show me where he is up to with the engine wiring. It is looking great I have to say. He does a very neat job, using trailer flex (as this has 7 or so wires all wrapped together). Phil is running the wires with good length on them and mounting all the components on a temporary board to keep it all together until I fit it permanently in the car. Unfortunately I left the picture at work so I can't post it here today, but I will send it home and get it on the blog soon so you can see what it all looks like.