Ace-Garageguy

The McLaren MP4 already uses a carbon composite "tub" monocoque passenger cell. As does the Lambo Aventador... ...and BMW's little i3 From EV WORLD.COM: "BMW i3 Reportedly Will Be Built in Half the Time of Conventional Steel Car In addition to fewer parts, the carbon fiber and aluminum chassis electric car will be 250 to 350 kg (551 to 771 lb) lighter than a comparable electric car. Published: 01-May-2013 The BMW Group (Munich, Germany) revealed more details about its forthcoming all-electric, composites-intensive i3 passenger vehicle in its annual report, issued on March 19. Norbert Reithofer, chairman of the Board of Management of BMW AG, says the first preseries BMW i3 rolled off the production line in January. Designed specifically to run with zero emissions in an urban environment, the commuter car will come onto the market by the end of the year. “Several hundred advance orders have already been received for the BMW i3,” adds Reithofer. The BMW i3 sports a carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP) passenger cell and an aluminum chassis and, says BMW, the vehicle sets new standards in the field of lightweight construction. BMW also reports the production times are reduced significantly by employing unique manufacturing methods and significantly fewer parts, simplifying assembly. The BMW i3 reportedly will require only half the time necessary to produce a conventional automobile." ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Carbon fiber is only ONE OF MANY composite material choices and fabrication techniques available to automobile designers...if they choose to look forward. The current Cirrus SR22 G3 /5 uses a carbon wing spar, and carbon reinforcements at critical locations. The Lancair Legacy kitplane is mostly carbon fiber... ...but Cirrus has been able to substitute cheaper foam-core fiberglass in their own design for much of the carbon in the Lancair, a result of experience and learning what works well in other composite aircraft. It's only a matter of time before composite materials see widespread use in surface-vehicles, but it's going to be later rather than sooner. Unfortunately. The Lotus Elite had an ALL-COMPOSITE fiberglass-stressed-skin-monocoque structure in 1957. It weighed 1100 pounds and could easily give 35 mpg. The rest of world is just now beginning to catch up.

I knew somebody would say that. When introduced, the aircraft was in the $200,000 range. Lotsa upgrades and redesigns have pumped the price WAY up over the past few years, BUT...THE TECHNOLOGY IS ADAPTABLE TO MASS-PRODUCED CARS, and COULD BE COST-COMPETITIVE. Economics of scale, ya know? And just like the oil-companies, most car companies persist in living in the past, doing business-as-usual with grossly heavy vehicles that incorporate silly bells and whistles in a vacuous nod to "progress". And the whole "even though we have solutions to ALL the world's problems staring us in the face, we're going to drag our feet and go forward as slowly as humanly possible, because we're either too stupid to recognize the future when it's knocking on the door, or we're just too afraid to make BIG changes" mentality IRKS THE LIVING SNOT OUT OF ME.

I love what you're doing here. Very nice work, all the way.

In actual fact, there is no "frame" in a Cirrus. Since 1995, one of my specialties has been the structural repair and reconstruction of these aircraft after severe damage, and I've become intimately familiar with their engineering. I also worked extensively on composite sailplanes with similar construction back in the '80s The fuselage is a monocoque design, which simply means the skin is "stressed" and carries the structural loads. It's made very much like a plastic model airplane, The fuselage is made in two halves in molds, and literally "glued" together. This is 1/2 of the fuselage skin, in the mold. The fuselage shell itself is a foam-core composite sandwich. The foam core is roughly 1/4" to 1/2" thick, and the fiberglass skins average about .050" thick. My avatar is a single-passenger, single-seat vehicle using the same technology. The design weight is around 600 pounds (MUCH heavier than necessary if it didn't have to incorporate crash-protection for operation in a world full of heavy vehicles).

I'm rarely envious of anybody for any reason...but MAN, that's some score. They're mostly all kits that appeal to me. Nice one.

Yes, but in many cases you can buy just the bulb for $15 to $25. Replacing it its another matter. Whereas the old "obsolete" round or rectangular bulbs (sealed-beam OR separate-bulb Euro-style) could be serviced with a phillips-head screwdriver from the front by most "average Joes"...though I HAVE seen several put in upside down) , it takes partial disassembly of the vehicle to get access to some of the more poorly-designed headlight installations in production vehicles. Ever see a car you had to take the wheel off of to get the headlight bulb replaced? I have.

It's tough to define "equivalent model". The recent Mustangs, if I'm not mistaken, are also considerably heavier than their older brethren. The current Camaro is around 3700 lbs. The '69 was around 3300. But here's a thought. A Cirrus SR22 airplane has 4 seats, a 550 cu.in., 300+ HP engine, an over-30 foot wingspan, it FLIES and goes almost 200 MPH (while carrying 4 fat adults and over 80 gallons of fuel). It also has at least twice the onboard electronics of a car, two complete sets of controls, air conditioning, AND a parachute that lets the whole mess down gently in the event of catastrophic failure. It weighs less than 2500 pounds. My point is that 4100 pounds of car is sloppily, ridiculously innefficient to carry one out-of-shape butt to work and back.

Funny how the "sealed beam" was the only legal lighting (headlights) in this country for ages (the Euro-style units were far superior in light output and management)...because the reflectors of the separate-bulb European-style units tended to tarnish sometimes (reducing light output)...but today, separate-bulb units are ubiquitous but the Fed doesn't seem to care that the crapp plastic the lenses are made of becomes yellowed excrement in a few years, reducing light output by as much as 50%.

It sure feels like it some days...

As I implied, the red car could be the right year for a "1.5", but somewhere along the line it could have received an earlier bonnet. They interchange (although they have to be hand-fitted to the specific car; even the factory replacement bonnets came with an unfinished rear edge that had to be trimmed to fit). Collision repair wasn't always done in strict accordance with "correct". Also you've got restorations, and "restorations" where whatever happens to be there is given a quick coat of shiny paint after the rot holes are fiberglassed over and bondoed or undercoated, and a dealer photographs the resulting mess and asks stupid money for it. Then some wannabe-expert re-posts the incorrectly-labeled photos, and more wrong information is spread like a virus. Pretty soon everybody is a Jag (or fill-in-the-blank) "expert".

The later series one cars did have un-covered headlights, but retained the small, over-bumper parking lights (as per keyser's pix). These cars have also been wrecked and repaired, modified, etc. over the years, so you just never know what you've got until you dig into a specific car. Internet experts don't always get it right either.

Speaking of headlight covers, I saw a shiny red covered-headlight VW Bug convertible (nice black-with-red-piping folded-top-cover), an early beige (small bumpers) VW fastback, and a non-rubber-bumper Corvette C3 convert, bright red too. All cars being driven. Yup. We just used to call 'em "late Series I" as opposed to "early Series I". I guess we weren't hip enough to call 'em "1.5".

Yes, exactly. Kinda like an aluminum Coke can versus an old "tin" can. Different materials, but even the weaker aluminum is much thinner than the steel in the old can designs. In the case of the cans, the pressure inside the can from the carbonation adds to the rigidity of the entire "structure" by keeping the can, basically, inflated. Elegant engineering. The Challenger engineers apparently made up for structural deficiencies somewhere by adding more steel. Not elegant engineering.

Bigger bumpers and non-glass-covered headlights, if I remember correctly, on the II cars. The headlights are pretty obvious, even at speed.

What year Carrera 4 are we talking about? '89-'94 could conceivably be bashed from the older 911 kits.

Red Jag E-type Series II convertible, and a white Ferrari 512 Boxer, both on the way back from the vet around noon.

Sorry Scott. That much weight just says to me "sloppy, uninspired engineering". Weight reduction in structural applications is something I've spent a good bit of time on. I submit that with a really top-notch structural team, that car could be brought in at 2800 pounds...certainly no more than 3300. A complete Porsche 906 only weighed 1300 pounds, and contemporary hillclimb variants weighed less than 1000. HSLA steel (high-strength, low alloy) was developed to be LIGHTER than the conventional mild steel the old tanks were made of, because you could use LESS steel to get MORE strength. And CAD/CAE should allow the structure to be maximized for crash performance while trimming unnecessary weight. The whole point of using CAD is to be able to analyze structural requirements better than un-aided humans can, and to allow designers and engineers to do more with less material. Somebody is missing the boat. I'm not piling on Chrysler. I like the car. But I was APPALLED when I saw how much the thing weighed. I've been building things all my life, and I know it's just too fat.

If you work for Toyota, I'n sure you know that Mr. Musk (Tesla) is putting in a network of fast-charging stations all over the country, and if you buy a big Tesla, you get free re-charging at his facilities. As far as infrastructure and convenience of refueling go...I was a paying member of the Natural Gas Vehicle Coalition ($1000+ per year) back in the mid-1990s. The group was actively lobbying for a widespread switch to compressed-natural-gas as a vehicle fuel. At the time, natural gas was much cheaper than gasoline for the same energy content (as it is now), the retrofit to a vehicle was relatively straightforward and cost-effective, and there was a cool little compressor on the market, the FuelMaker, that would refuel your car overnight from your in-house natural gas line. Infrastructure widely in place, un-beatable convenience, and a decent chance of payback of the investment from reduced fuel costs. Did the world go for it? Nah. Instead, because natural gas is cheap and burns clean, most of our production (and we have so much, the price is too low to make getting it out of the ground "worthwhile") goes to "peak" electricity generating plants, or to replace older, dirty coal-burning plants. Cheaper to take the short term expedient...instead of cleaning up the coal plants (and we have 100 years of coal right here in the good ol' USA) and using the cheap natural gas to power our cars, relatively easily, for 60 years or more (again, we're floating on the stuff), we're squandering it to make cheap carbon-credit-traded electricity...while we continue to get screwed every time we bend over at the gas pump. In the meantime, the world seems to be hell-bent on making the car you drive to get groceries more complex than the effing space-shuttle. Somebody explain why.

Duplicolor automotive clear in rattlecans from the auto-parts stores will work well over Duplicolor colors, as well as Testors basecoats (NOT ENAMELS) and Testors "one coat" lacquer. And you get a pretty big can (8 oz.) for about $7 in my market. http://cjcs.com/1279/dupli-color-clear-top-coat-change/

Whatcha wantin' to haul? Ladders? Pipe? A rack like this, but with longer legs inside the bed-sides, with flat, 4-bolt flanges welded to the bottoms, through-bolted to the bed-floor with matching 4-bolt doubler-plates underneath ought to do it. Same way bolt-in roll-bars are mounted in race-cars. Probably the way this one was done, but most likely with brackets through-bolted to the bed-sides as well, to keep it upright. Then you could just use a conventional roof-rack over the cab.

If you decide to go with a later-period gasser, remember that the extreme nose-up attitudes of a lot of cars presented today as "gassers" is wrong. In general, frames were required to be level or slightly nose down, and there were specs at some point about height of the crank centerline off the ground. Ohio George's Willys is about the limit of up-ness for the class.

Romeo Palamides introduced a solid-center "mag" wheel for drag racing in 1956, and was the forerunner of American Racing Wheels. It looked rather like this, and can be found on a lot of period cars in the old photos. The November 1954 Hot Rod mag cover depicts a '35 and a '36 Ford going head to head in a drag race. Early gas-class cars, or "competition coupes", these were, I believe, the inspiration for Bernard's resin-bodied build. One chopped, one not.

Yes, since 1995 I've been harping in places far removed from this forum about the wisdom of petroleum companies redefining or re-inventing themselves as ENERGY companies, and putting their vast capital reserves to work developing alternatives. T. Boone Pickens was one of the oil giants who seemed to realize the inevitable (oil wells-running-dry), and even he hasn't been able to make much of a dent in the business-as-usual big-oil mindset. But EVERYBODY seems to be behaving as though gas is cheap and will last forever. Take the Dodge Challenger. The 1970 version is listed as weighing in at between about 2950 and 3400 pounds. Kinda chunky for a smallish car, but being built on a shortened "big car" platform, that's what you got. Today's Challenger is a porky 4160. WHAT ??? With all the much-touted HSLA steel, computer-aided engineering and analysis, etc., you'd reasonably think today's version would weigh at least somewhat LESS than the 1970 iteration. But no, it's a heavy pig, burning a LOT more fuel to accelerate all the extra blubber than is necessary. Nobody big is really doing anything (other than talking) about the looming energy crisis, other than long-term visionaries like Mr. Tesla, Elon Musk.

Please have your legal team contact ours at your earliest possible convenience regarding the nickels-and-dimes you wish to recover for our allegedly un-licensed usage of the term "nickel".

My point was that a retailer can refuse to carry a product if the MANUFACTURER has what the retailer considers to be insufficient insurance. EVERY manufacturer of ANYTHING sold at HD will have extensive liability insurance in place, and it probably makes up a significant proportion of cost-of-product. Neither HD nor any other retailer is willing to accept the ENTIRE liability for a product, and the solar-panel guys may not have enough right now. As cheap as the panels are for their power output, it's a distinct possibility. BUT, you may also be ENTIRELY right, and it may only be a lack of suitable kits. PS. Google "solar diy kits"...