My new whip.. :)

[crazycanadian]

Qualcomm is only 15 minutes from my house will be their to show my support and watch I forgot qualcom still hosted auto x racing . I only go for the race legal drag races still

That's great news bud. Look forward to meeting you down there.

[pumer1904]

Like wise I think I'm the only bg / escort fanatic left in San Diego

[mazpr]

You need the JDM bumpers, or maybe cut the original ones as I have seen some do. It shows how these cars still after many years still hold true on the road.

[crazycanadian]

You need the JDM bumpers, or maybe cut the original ones as I have seen some do. It shows how these cars still after many years still hold true on the road.

cut the original one how? I think you'll see something different when the front splitter is finished


Christmas has come early. I took my son out shopping to get final presents for the family and I came home with this.

2 new Racing Seat brand seats. Different colours due to them being floor models on a cleanse sale. RCI 5 point harnesses, RCI 5 gal foam filled fuel cell and a Walbro 255 high volume fuel pump.

[crazycanadian]

Rob and I got some work done on the autocross car today.

This is our front splitter ruffed out. We are using dibond material aprox 1/4" thick. It's an interesting material. It's a composite material sandwiched between an aluminum skin. This makes it lighter then using wood and weather proof.



new tie bar thanks to ferdi


Rob welding away. He really liked my little 110 miller.


Mocking up a front support. This is where the strut rods for the front splitter will mount to.



started playing with the seats. This is how much the new Racing seats weigh with out tracks.


The weight of the stock mx3 gs cloth seats with out tracks.


Stock fuel tank with about half a tank of gas in it. When racing Rob and I had to run over 3/4 of a tank of gas. Otherwise we would get fuel starvation issues.


New 5 gal fuel cell empty.


more pictures coming later on tonight.

[crazycanadian]

We also removed the mx3 control arms I had in the car. With the interest of reducing my SAI angle, I have decided to go back to stock 323 control arms for this season. When we removed the control arms we noticed the stock 323 arms felt lighter. Since I had the scale out I decided to check what they weighed for ****s and giggles.

Mx3 control arm, with Ryan's spherical bearings installed.


Stock 323 control arm with stock bushings.


Just to show the proof. Mx3 arms are slightly longer then stock 323 arms.




The new tie bar with an extra tab welded to it for mounting the splitter.


according to SMF rules we are allowed to have our splitter stick out 6 inches past the furthest point on the front bumper. In order to get the contour of the bumper to line up with the splitter we came up with this little tool. The pen didn't work so well, so version 2 involved a good fine tip marker. We played connect the dots. Turned out pretty good.





At the end of the day I cut out the hole for the fuel cell and mocked it up in place. I was surprised how low it sits. I thought it was going to sit up higher.

[FE3-323]

im certain the MX3 arms are heavier due to the 3rd layer of steel inside of them. normal BG arms don't have a middle support layer in them. physically weaker by design.
im interested to hear your results switching back to the stock arms for this season. do you plan to swap the sphericals into the stock arms too?

[crazycanadian]

Yep the plan is to switch the sphericals over to the stock arms. I also plan to switch from an mx3 gs front sway bar to a zx2 bar. The alignment set up will be the most interesting part.

[FE3-323]

run drop links from the strut to the sway bar instead of ---swaybar to the LCA. the increase in efficiency makes up for the size difference.
I actually had to downgrade my front swaybar back to a LX(from zx2) running it off the strut vs the LCA.
at least look into it

[crazycanadian]

I remember reading xelderx posts about that. I forgot about it till you mentioned it. I wonder what I can do to make that happen.

[FE3-323]

you still have coilovers on it right? you should be able to get the adapter piece from the later BJ ksports & make it happen.
Im quite happy with mine, altho i will lightly change the design this spring to add in a bearing on the bottom.
I'm not sure how AWR units work. but i've noticed my locking nuts always come free. which means despite high misalignment spacers its still moving more than the heim maximum angle degree causing the lock nuts to come free.
If you have any questions you think i could answer just shoot me a call/text/pm

[crazycanadian]

Yaaa! more updates from last weekend. Spent most of my 3 days off hacking away at my to do list.

First up was tackling the sway bar. I swapped out the Mx3 GS front sway bar for a Zx2 bar. This proved to be a lot of fun. I didn't want to remove my rear header to drop the sub frame down. Instead I unbolted the motor and lowered it with in the engine bay to allow the frame to come down enough to slip the sway bar in.

I haven't measured the difference but the Zx2 bar is larger. I lucked out and managed to reuse the Mx3 sway bar brackets with the Zx2 bushings. This saved me from some fab work. I might still need to do something down the road though. The Zx2 bar binds up on the back of the sub frame if the suspension droops enough.



While I was at it, I fixed the front tie bar so that it would bolt up properly. I also installed a set of 323 lower control arms with my old SS bushings.

Next up I tackled the seats. I needed to build my own brackets to go from the universal rails for the new seats to the floor. My first attempt didn't go so well. I had the rails bolted on upside down (Face palm). I started out, round 2 by building a jig for the rails. This way I could use the jig to level everything out in the car so that the seats were tilted funny.


I used some 1/8" plate and some square tube to form 2 straps.


This is where the jig really helped. I bolted some mounting tabs to the rails and placed the jig on top of the straps and located where I wanted the tabs to go and tacked them in place.


The final product.


Both driver and passenger seats mounts are complete. Just need a little touch up and some paint.


Next up was the fuel cell. I managed to build the brackets and get it installed.


The floor is really flimsy metal, so I used some extra 1/8" plate on top and bottom to sandwich the floor and add some structure to it.


Rob was also over 1 day working on the front splitter. He managed to get all the front strut rods completed. This task took him quite some time as he had to hand thread half the pieces because he couldn't find any left hand threaded rod that would work. I'll have to take some more pictures because there is lots of little detail work thats gone into this splitter.

A shot with out the bumper.

[crazycanadian]

Some extra pictures Rob took.

[crazycanadian]

Well there is no how to guide when it comes to fitting a splitter to a production based car. Especially a little econo box 323. It just takes a lot of time.

Rob came over this weekend and put some more time in while I spent time with my family. Here's some pretty pictures of his work.

[FE3-323]

awesome to see even more pictures here. looks like some great work guys!