So while this car isn't crazy baller like Tyler's new blue chassis, I think it is going to be a much more fun car to drive. The white car was giving Tyler the chance to be really aggressive with his driving, where I feel like the blue car was becoming too nice and far too prepared to really wreck once he finished it. And the fear of wrecking your car makes you a terrible driver. The mid mount setup is really similar to how the blue car has it's intercooler setup, and we are simply continuing to build the white car in a super budget conscious fashion that can be driven aggressively and often. Almost every part of what we are adding to the car is either from my junk pile, or just created with the skill Derrick has in his hands. Of course I still spent a couple thousand dollars in an argon bottle, lots of welding rod, food, fuel, spark plugs, hose, bolts, cooler, blah blah blah, but it is pennies on the dollar compared to the blue car. I am really lucky I have the resources of Derrick and Autocomp to pour into this project, otherwise the car wouldn't have turned out so well.
Before we get started with pictures and more story, here is a little teaser of what is currently sitting in front of Tyler's blue car. Will's 2013 FD build that Will and Marty are working on.
Also, I spent like 6 hours sand blasting my V8 headers with the wrong blasting medium.
And here you can see Derrick making the complex intake pipe for the MAF to turbo. We couldn't come up with the correct bends out of my intercooler parts pile, so he started pie cutting his way to victory. If you know Derrick, he does this a lot.
And at Autocomp we work almost exclusively with Snap-On tools! Baller, except for the constant fear of loosing a set of 200 dollar sockets LOL. I clean each tool every night as I tuck it back into the most ridiculous tool box I have ever seen. It is the same one team Falken pulls behind a truck onto grid at events.
Most of the power tools are Dewalt, as the Snap-On ones don't seem to fare as well for some reason.
Here I lay out the Tyler/Aaron exhaust pile and start picking parts. I ended up with basically a straight pipe on the car and need to revisit that soon, as I am going to try and drive this on the street some for fun.
Power steering cooler is getting sandwiched between the intercooler and radiator, and will hopefully get some airflow from the fan.
The steering rack had no boots on it, so I bought some replacement boots and slid them on.
Here is another more finished pic of the engine bay.
I stole an oil cooler off of my E46 as well and attached it to the firewall. I capped off the front t fitting on the valve cover and ran the hose around the rear of the engine, and capped the breather that comes out of the block down by the exhaust manifold.
We decided to run no blowoff valve after already putting one on the piping, so we deleted it. No BOV on this car of any kind! Sorry turbo, but you are going to sound RAD!
Oh Tyler! Leaving us surprises!
Game of latches. Not as interesting as Game of thrones, but it got sorted out with bending things. And now it closes! Still haven't really finished the door latch setup though. Not sure what is going on with that.
Had to resort to these a lot lately. Rethreading tools for those that don't know. it is for when you or someone you know royally screws up something that screws into something else.
And the Autocomp stomp shear! I call him stompy and I love him! Combined with the bending break ( or brake? ) I can make little bracket for fun to amuse myself. Fun times.
Here we are trying to figure out what in the world Tyler did to this poor window regulator. It took us about an hour of jigsaw puzzling, but it finally came back together. It was really bizarre, but something like this would not have kept his attention for more than the unbolting process. Hence why it didn't work. He did some really weird things with screws though that we couldn't figure out.
I was so proud of myself to procure a 1 piece driveshaft for the car.... and when going to install it I found it ALREADY HAD ONE. TYLER'S MISSILE CAR THAT IS A SALVAGED TITLE BLOWN T25 CAR WITH A STOCK SIDE MOUNT HAD A 1 PIECE DRIVE SHAFT ALREADY!?!?! Only in the world of Tyler Cox would a 2500 dollar car have a 500 dollar driveshaft installed, and baller coilovers. The coilovers and drive shaft alone were worth more than the car could be sold for when I started working on it.
And finally, the street shot. Luckily this gas station is literally in the parking lot of Autocomp, and the street Autocomp lays on is pretty quiet other than security cameras. So we did a little night testing of the car and a lot of waste gate/boost controller stepup. The wastegate on my turbo was set at 18 psi, so we had to go and swap it after a couple pulls for another one, then add a boost controller. The motor is 100% stock inside with a stock ecu, stock injectors, 10 psi off the turbo, and a stock maf. I have Nismo 550s and a z32 maf that will get tossed on the car as soon as I get a mail in tune for it hopefully, then I will probably run around 12-18 psi when I go play with the car. I also picked up wide body for it, but will be running stock bumpers and skirts. The fenders are only to fit the larger wheels I run so I don't need yet ANOTHER clutch of wheels for yet another car. I probably have well over 20 wheels at this point, fitting a mixture of 4 cars.
I need to get some Tyler Cox Memorial Missile Car vinyl made up, if someone want to cut it for me I would appreciate it. I will design it!
Things to get done when I get back from Utah, paint some stock bumpers, get some side skirts, put on all the sweet fancy marker lights and stuff I scored, enjoy the freshly redone head lights, maybe find a new stock hood and a front bumper lip, install the fenders, do an alignment, get the ecu and install some go fast parts, CLEAN IT, AND GO DRIFT IT!!! It will be at the FEB 17 event.