LocostUSA.com

New member on the forum here. I'm not building a Locost, but I am building a small British car that has a non-traditional power source.

The car is a 1959 Austin Healey "Bugeye" Sprite that I've owned for nearly 25 years. I've run a number of different engines in it during that time, including a Datsun L18 and a hybrid LZ22 engine. Last year I decided to go rotary power, and for the past few months I've been working on getting the new engine installed. Along the way, I've had to completely re-fab the entire front end of the car; i.e., I basically took a sawzall and cut off everything from the firewall forward. I've got new upper and lower frame rails newly installed, and have the engine and tranny mounted. This week, we're working on the front suspension.

Engine is a 1992 JDM TII 13B that I will rebuild and install a larger turbo onto.

IRS rear suspension is mostly Datsun based, though I intend to replace it with Miata parts later this year.

Front suspension uses Miata hubs, spindles and lower ball joints. I'm fabbing pretty much everthing else from scratch.

If I can figure out how to post photos I'll get some on here to share.

Cheers,
Bug

Rear exterior view of car. I'm selling the wheels and tires shown here and switching over to Miata 16-inch rims. The goal is to get the tires tucked back under the bodywork to clean up the lines a bit. (In 25 years, I've never painted the car; maybe it's time

Here are some shots of the IRS setup, including some labels to help make sense of the bits.




[/img]

And some photos from this week's endeavour: the front suspension:

Here's a shot of the tube frame/tunnel I've built going through the center of the car:

Nice work. I've always liked those bugeyes.

Here's a shot of the upper A-arms we're building:

Nice work, welcome to the forum. keep us posted.

Looks like a fun build, Bug. I've always liked the little Sprites. Ever seen this build?

http://www.ado13.com/dohczuke/dohc.htm

Great work. I'm very impressed with your fabrication skills. This car is going to be sick.

Well, we screwed up on the upper A-arms. Thought I had all the clearances figured out, but when we went to bolt in the arms I had an interference issue. Arhgh. That's about two days of work down the drain. So it was back to the drawing board yesterday....

That's the bad news. The good news is I found some very inexpensive, but trick screw-in ball joint adapters at a local circle track supplier. After a little measurement and then cutting out some tabs and studs, we've built the upper ball joint piece. I taper reamed out the Miata spindle and now have a super cheap/strong Ford ball joint in place on both sides. The plan is to (re)build the upper arms today. I'll post pics of the arms when I'm done with them. In the meantime, here's the upper ball joint adapters.

And here's some images of the upper A-arms mocked up in the car. Astute locost guys will notice the upper arm straight pieces are actually Kinetic parts. I bought their upper a-arm kit a few months ago, but in the tight confines of the car, it just couldn't be made to fit. Fortunately, I can use some of the pieces with my Ford ball joint adapters.

Made some more progress during the last few days. We got the upper arms pretty much finished and mounted. There's still a lot of frame bracing required around the arm and shock mount members, but it looks pretty straight forward to fab.



Everything was modeled up in SolidWorks ahead of time, but there was a lot of last minute changes to the design, so I was pretty worried about the final product. My worries were unfounded, it turns out. We've got a nice camber gain as the pieces move, and I have a lot of adjustability. I can dial in +1 to -8 degrees of camber and 0 to 8 degrees of caster. With a few degrees of caster and -1 degree of camber, there is essentially zero bump steer, too.

We did have to modify the miata spindles a bit more, however. Besides reaming out the upper piece to accept the larger ball joint, we had to tweak the steering arms a bit to better align with the steering rack. We basically heated up the arm and then took a large wrench and nudged it up into alignment. Let it cool down slowly and its good to go. Nice forged miata spindles let you get away with stuff like this


The steering unit is a Sweet Engineering assembly. It's gonna be tight feeding the steering shaft(s) up to the wheel, but it looks doable. All in all it's coming together pretty nicely.

Just my kind of project
I am looking forward to more pictures as you progress.
Good on you mate!
Not just another 7 clone.

I'm Bugeyed looking at it

James

Which way did you bend it? Did you check to see what this did to your Ackerman? When turning the wheel does the inside (of the turn) tire still trun more than the outside?