E30 Race Car wreck, time for major surgery

[Lance Racing]

8:00am and our surgeon Peng arrives that we're helping out for the day. Great guy Peng is, thanks Peng for letting us work in your area and use your tools!



Here Peng is pulling the firewall out a little bit. We left some of the old front end on to have things to pull on. As we didn't need parts, we'd cut them off little by little



Stephanie looking for more welds to drill out.



A rare picture of me, LOL.



Once the firewall was pulled, Peng used the sawzall to eliminate more of the old car:

[Lance Racing]

1:30pm

Here's the blue car that had contact with me loading out. It was repaired first, before our car. Normally i'd help push, but they had plenty of bodies and I needed to get our car done! Notice they are loading it without the front suspension.



Here the final bit of old material from the frame rail is taken out of the "saddle" that holds the frame rail. All of those circles were welds.



Shot shows the saddle on each side. The orange horizontal line reminded us to only drill out welds above that line.



This is a monumental moment, we are done tearing old stuff of the existing car!



Here you can see we saved the battery tray, working that area removing welds was a bitch.



Here I'm pointing to a little piece that holds the back bracket that the hood wheel slides back into. Note how far back we've peeled back the car, all the way to the base of the A-pillar. Honestly I didn't realize when we agreed to do this that we'd have torn back so far into the existing car.

[Lance Racing]

4:30pm

Before we can set the donor clip in place, Peng needs to straighten the saddles that the frame rail will set in. Notice how the saddle is scewed to the right, it should align with the horizontal steel pad right in front of it.



So the hydraulics are brought in to pull on the saddle:







He does small tugs to bring the saddle into alignment step by step.

[Lance Racing]

Parallel to working on the main car, the same amount of work taking apart welds and prepping edges is going on with the donor clip. It is now cleaned up and ready to mate to the car!

With the clip very much naked, it was interesting to see some of the strategies for how they designed "crumple zones" that we hear about.

This shot barely shows litte dimples along the right side of the frame rail. These spots are designed to buckle in a frontal impact:



Here I've made orange arrows to more easily see the location of the dimples. I guess they are the opposite of dimples because they go out, not in.



Then note the orange circle. There are a number of holes, like swiss chess, both as shown and on the bottom side. This allows this area to deform. Basically they seemed to make the front part of the nose "softer" and the front end gets stronger and stronger as it gets closer to the firewall.



The swiss cheese holes on the under side:

[Lance Racing]

5:00pm

One person mentioned how this was like climbing a mountain. You go up and up, and it just looks ugly and worse and worse. Then you hit the top, and there's still work to do, but now the car comes back together little by little. Well here was a very exciting moment, we place the donor clip onto the Celette metal jigs and start the process of making the car bigger again!

What is special about this Celette rack is they have kits of jigs for every type of car made. A body shop owns the basic rack, then they rent the jig kit for whenever they have a certain type of car in. Once done with the car, they send the jig kit back. In Seattle here, they rent the kits from a location in Portland 200 miles to the south. For very rare cars, they get the jig kits out of Chicago I think I heard.

The kits have these various pieces that the car sits on. The jigs are placed very accurate, and holes in the top plates of the jig align with holes or other points on the car. If the holes on the car don't align with the jig holes, they know the car is not in alignment.



Here Peng sets one of the front jigs.





As the various areas are looked at where the two major components will mate, the front end is slowly tugged back into place. The jigs will tell us when we are aligned in the x, y and z direction.



Here you can sort of see a gap between the fire wall and the donor clip edge. The firewall is still pushed in a little, so we'll tap on the firewall from the inside to nudge it back out about 5-10 mil. to allow the welds to work.



This jig to the left of the clamp uses the holes that the front sub frame bolts in to:

[Lance Racing]

6:30pm

Wow, it's been a long day, now it's time for the night shift to come in. Here shop owner Jeff shows us how to use this welder.



Tom swung after work to see how it was going. Here he's calling Regina to say he's going to be a little late for dinner. Like 8 hours eventually!



Jeff doing the more complicated welds.



Dinner around 8pm





Only 2 more hours of work to go tonight:



new roll of copper wire for the welder



welding the frame rail to the saddle:







I didn't get any final group picture of us, but the car is ready to wheel over to their lift and remove from the Celette rack, which we'll do Saturday morning.

1:15am and we're going home! Thanks everyone!

[TrackAddict]

Good eye!

This is not a SpecE30 car. We run up here in Seattle in an E30 spec class called PRO-3. PRO-3 is very similar to SpecE30 but the suspension package is open in the rule book (compared to SpecE30 which has a specific spring/shock combo, right?). We are not allowed to use remote reservoir shocks however. So the Ground Control ADs are legal.

Thanks for the clarification, Lance.

There's a chance that I may be moving up to the Seattle area next year (I work for Boeing) and it sounds like my BMW CCA KP class car might be eligible for Pro-3.

Good luck with getting her back up and running!

[Fanzotti]

That's total insanity.

You are a brave man.

[Hick]

Very cool post! Thank you for taking so may pictures, i had an idea of how everything went together on these things but its nice to see it in action.

Any pictures of how the other car [the one that hit you] looked after impact?

[Keith M]

Go Lance! I'll never forget the smile Stephanie had on her face after her first stint at the PIR enduro in '06. This is all going to be worth it.
Glad to see that Fred's car is fixed and I hope there is no hard feelings between you two.

Keith
Team Green Dot

[Lance Racing]

No hard feeling between me and Fred. We were both unlucky recipients of previous events.

Here we are back Saturday AM to lift the car off the Celette rack. The rack, with car, rolls really easy on the concrete floor. But you have to remember that once moving, you can have thousands of pounds moving, and you don't want it to slam into another car in the shop. So we push slowly.



It's free!



Existing suspension ready for install so we can roll the car. Subframe is being replaced, but it is not ready yet.



Suspension is bolted on and ready to roll to the next location. Work is scheduled for just about every day until race weekend, so the pics will come more often now.

[PiercedE30]

Very cool, looks like a lot of progress, and a lot of work, has been done and your in the final stretch.

[Lance Racing]

So far we have 130 hours on the car to this point. 75% is volunteer time.

[Jean]

Engine swap is cake compared to this !!! Amazing !

[Lance Racing]

We've now moved the car to a secret paint shop where we are painting the engine bay prior to engine installation. Here we apply seam sealer at the welded connections between donor clip and firewall. The seam sealer is white. It keeps water out of the joints to prevent rust.





And here was a little dog hanging around the shop.