Slight diversion

Only had single day off over holidays to work on car, so decided to take a slight diversion away from the chassis focus and devoted some time to the interior. Given the limited amount of interior space inside a Mini, picked up a Kirkey aluminum race seat (will be adding a second for passenger side) that should work quite nicely given the narrow seat width.

The seats are quite comfortable to sit in, but would prefer to have some creature comforts for longer street drives, so the plan is to add some additional foam inserts for the lower and upper seat backs and then have them upholstered in some distressed black leather that I picked up.

Decided the seat foam will need to have some additional strength, so got started on fabricating some fiberglass pans for lower and upper seat portions.

Applied some simple aluminum foil to the seat to protect seat and aid in releasing resin, cut the fiberglass mat material (few layers), and got started with applying the resin. When the resin hardened, cut the fiberglass to the required size using an air powered hacksaw. More to follow.

Chassis tubing begins...

Picked up quite a number of lengths of 1.5"x1.5"x.120" square tubing. Our plan is to build out the lower chassis rails and cross-members with the intention of allowing the front and rear S2000 factory sub-frames to bolt into the new chassis.  This strategy will allow both the engine and transmission, and rear suspension assemblies to drop from the bottom while the car is on the lift should full service of either ever be required.

Starting from the rear and working forward, we began by mocking up short lengths of tubing to get an idea of where the factory sub-frame mounting location points would need to be transferred to the tubing.

Fired up the mill and drilled some 1" holes into the tubing into which some 5/8" NF threaded steel bungs were installed and then welded into place. The rear rails also required some short steel spacer blocks to be welded in place in order to permit the rails to clear the rear upper control arm mounts.

Next up was to calculate the necessary angles in the tubing rails required to meet up with the front mounting hole location on the rear sub-frame. Once that was figured out, cut the tubing and welded the sections together.

Used the same approach to start work on the main rear cross-member which also required jog at the mounting pads in order to maintain the desired floor pan depth.

 

Using some heavier gauge metal, bent up some new inner rocker panels and welded them in to the outer factory rocker panels with a series of plug welds. This new panel will be used to mount the chassis floor structure to the body.