Back on all Fours!!!

I will let pictures do most of the talking on this one, mostly because I cannot explain this elegantly. Not that there is anything remotely elegant about this.

Here is it in all of it's glory, for you skeptics out there, notice the rear bumper and the blue colour in that area.

The back wheels are roughly where they ought to be. We extended the wheelbase by about an inch, the reason being that it made our trimming job much easier. Besides, I don't think it will hurt the handling...too much.

Of course there is still the issue of four wheel steering that we don't need for the race. It does make it very easy to manoeuvre the Metroneige around the yard, so we may keep that feature for a while. We're not quite sure how to remedy to the problem just yet, but I have a few ideas.

For those of you interested in how it's actually holding up, There's a floor extension and side panels welded in. These panels were cut out using paper card templates, trimmed to fit and then screwed into place using good old self tapping sheet metal screws. Once every piece was in position, they were welded using plug welds (a.k.a. rosette welds).

Not everything is fully welded in yet, the floor piece needs more welding and some patches. We're gonna try to get access to a lift to make this easier.

There is still lots of work to be done to the shell to get it ready for the engine transplant, including:

• Finish rust repair
• Welding in floor panel completely
• Gussetting/reinforcements
• Paint, since winter is gonna get here much faster than we think!

Measurements, Levelling and Patience!

A lot of progress has been made since our last update, I will try to go over it chronologically.

At the end of our last update, I spoke briefly about the difficulties of splicing together two large hunks of metal in a "measured" fashion. Simply moving stuff around is labour intensive due to the mass and shapes. Compounding the problem is our fantastic garage floor:

At this point, we had to give the entire assembly a good once over to make sure all the critical areas were properly ground to bare metal, since access may become more difficult later.

Now the measurement fun begins: The red Geo shell needed to be levelled. We chose two reference lines, one being the topmost of the front shock towers and the second being what's left of the lip where the rear seats used to be. We used a lot of spirit levels and a digital protractor to get everything squared within 0.1 degree (apparently...). Having a lot of hands on deck was very useful for this, as it is a trial and error process.

• Move jack
• Lift car
• Shim jackstands
• Drop car onto jackstands
• Measure alignment
• Repeat

And given about half a day, you end up with this:

Which looks completely unimpressive to the untrained eye. To us however, this was a triumphant moment.

This neatly brings us to finding and marking the centerline of the car. Remember those ancient Egyptian tricks I spoke of last update? Well they came in handy as Eric demonstrates the modern version of the old plumb bob using the nylon string+big socket combo.

Something similar was done to mark the centerline of the Firefly's subframe. Then we lined up the two halves at their respective centers and tacked it in at the shifter and we pinned the back in place using sheet metal screws.

Needless to say that ALL alignments were checked and rechecked at every step in the process. I'm not quite sure how straight the car will actually be in the end, but I think it will be good enough for it's intended purpose. Only a decent alignment will tell. Nobody said this was a good idea...

Work Weekend!! Day 3 (Creationism)

Day 3

Sunday picks up where Saturday left off, with more noisy cutting and grinding. I would like to take the time to really thank Eric's neighbours for their tolerance and patience!

Some things are best removed with the Sawzall (whose proper name is reciprocating saw, before the Milwaukee Tool Company complains). Yesterday, you saw the car up way high on stands and blocks, we figured the easiest way to go about trial fitting is to lower the Geo onto the new rear end.

Here you can see it's getting close, but there is STILL more trimming needed. Another clearance issue becomes apparent, the shifter location. Let me re-iterate on this a bit, we don't count on being able to use the shifter while running, but it's still needed for gear ratio setup, and the all important reverse gear! I can't speak for the others, but I know I will most definitely need that on the track.

Wheel placement is also at play here: it needs to go where the rear wheels used to be! We are trying to increase the wheelbase slightly, since it probably can't hurt!

After three days worth of work, IT FITS!!! Everything clears nice and tight. I have to thank the original Suzuki design team for helping us, it seems that the angle the body tapers (viewed from top) is the same front to back, which made life much much easier. Also note how we were able to preserve the small beam where the hatch latch goes, and that the bumper is where it should be.

From the inside, you can just about see where the shifter ends up. It's not in the best spot in relation to the seat but you can operate it. You can also see the rough cutout for the snowmobile engine. It will probably go much lower, but for now this is all we could cut without going through the (rear) steering rack mounts.

I think it's maybe time to start talking about structural integrity for this lot, so forgive my ramblings as I try to put this into words. What is key here, is tying the firewall from the Firefly (highlighted in baby blue, ha ha) to the rest of the Geo (in red). First will be joining everything at the floor. This involves tying the floor mounts from the blue bit, into the box section from the red bit. We plan on doing this with a clever box beam of some sort, using some scavenged door crash bars from the Firefly.

Next will be tying up the sides. We want to blue bit on the right to mate nicely to the B-pillar from the red car, and back down to the floor. This I think involves some kind of sheet gusset, going from the side of the blue firewall, to the red B-pillar (at the door), then back down to the floor. The end result of this should like (VERY APPROXIMATELY) like an F1 tub. Yes ladies and gents, I am making an F1 reference on a Lemons project.

Of course, we'll have to accomplish this while measuring and aligning both axles so we end up with a straightish car, while working outside on a soft and uneven dirt and mud surface using basic hand tools and measuring equipment no more sophisticated than the ancient Egyptians had... Of course they did make some pretty cool monuments

Work Weekend!! Day 2

Day 2

Saturday was spent cutting, a lot! We used a few different methods for this, first being the sawzall. Everybody goes on about the sawzall (with the appropriate blade of course) being the weapon of choice for cutting through a car. We also tried the more traditional grinder with cutting wheel, which seemed to wear through very quickly, and with a diamond tipped wheel. The same kind typically reserved for cutting tiles or masonry. This did a fantastic job when cutting through a single layer of sheet, and was easier than the sawzall when it comes to accuracy.

Step one was to make some cardboard templates, to give us a rough idea of what needs to go and what needs to stay. We are trying to keep the outside shell of the car intact, to preserve the appearance of a "normal" Geo. Of course, the plan is to go by trial and error, so we cut up enough so that we think we can get the Firefly part into the Geo, try it, fail, then cut some more... In order to ensure a good fit, we had to do this a lot.

Yours truly, now standing in what used to be the rear subframe. Interesting to note that Geos don't actually have subframes that you can unbolt as such. Everything is welded in, which is great for lightness, but bad for rust. In this case, all of the structurally important boxes were corroding from the inside.

After a few hours of trimming off the back in chunks, you end up with a fair sized hole, which is getting pretty close. The goal here was to be able to wheel the Firefly subframe under the Geo, to physically match things up. You can also see that we left some of the box section (I guess you could call it some kind of beam) that extends aft. The intent here is to use it to tie things together, but we have zero idea on how long this part needs to be.

Finally, after a day's work it sort of fits. In reality, the Geo is jacked up WAY high, as high as the 5-ton jackstands will allow: This makes the roof a few inches taller than a Suzuki SX-4. The major clearance issues to be solved tomorrow are:

• The length of those boxed sections I mentioned earlier
• The bottom corners of the fenders, by this I mean where the bumper used to be.
• The inner fenders need more trimming.

And on to day 3!!!

Work Weekend!! Day 1

We haven't given up on the Metroneige just yet, although it's been a while since our last update: Summer fun does get in the way of progress sometimes, but I digress.

A (nearly) three day push was planned for last weekend. I will be giving you day by day accounts, since work was divided as such.

Day 1

Today's plan was to finish gutting the Firefly, that meant salvaging what we could in terms of parts and sheet metal, then chopping her up ready for disposal. I will let pictures do most of the explaining:

Having the car already split into two halves certainly helped with the job.

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Draining nasty old gas. Although it's hard to tell, this had turned red from nearly three years of sitting in a rusting tank...

The more clever among you will notice a sweet stiffer spring swap done to the Firefly... actually we decided to keep the original/actual springs. These are supposedly stiffer than the springs on the Metro, and can be adapted to fit (maybe).

The team also managed to finish the patching on the more major rust holes in the floor of the Metro. Yes that is black paint, delicately applied to the floor by dumping it out of the can and wiping it around using paper towels. Eric's reasoning on this is that by integrating some rust particles and dirt to the paint, we can get a free non-slip surface.

Finally, the last accomplishment of the day was cleaning the rust off the Firefly front suspension/axle/assembly thing and trimming it down to the bare essentials.

Slicing Through the Firefly

In order to maintain a clean workspace, move along with the project, recover some money and re-use some sheet metal, it was time to cut through the Firefly parts car. Nothing fancy really, just a sawzall, some decent blades and a few angle grinders did the trick. I keep being reminded how little there is to a car.



Man, these Fireflies come with everything including the kitchen sink:



Okay before anyone complains about it, we may have artificially the salvage weight of our scrap metal pile... A short trip to the metal recyclers yielded 91$ !!!! We also have to do another trip shortly.

While we're on the topic of work areas, our reader (yes, singular) has asked for a picture of our super garage, well P.G. here it is:

Rustasaurus

Well the last few weeks have been really informative for some team members: learning about rust and just how far the damage can extend from where you think it stops. Most important however is learning to deal with it!

Firstly, we decided to tackle something "easy", fixing the front shock tower rust holes. For our devoted readers, you may remember these used to be patched up with fibreglass. Well, we started by recycling the front fenders from the Firefly and start cutting up some patches. This is a fairly straightforward operation and quite boring, unless...

You decide to cheap out, because it's a Lemons project and you will weld up everything using flux cored wire in your MIG welder!!! Needless to say this was a horrible idea. For anyone who's ever tried this, you will sympathise. For anyone who have never tried it, don't! Save yourself the trouble.

To make a long story short, I eventually bought shielding gas and things are better now... Pictures show work done so far:

On a side note, a big shout out to Bill from California. He's a seasoned Lemoneer who decided to visit us and share an absolutely astonishing amount of information with us. I'm glad to say we we're also able to teach him a little something too: there's a BIG difference between a 500$ car in California, versus a 500$ car in Ontario. Thanks again Bill!