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Carbon Fibre Lexus Day 2

Made some good progress on the Lexus project car today. Removed both the rear door skins and the side impact bars. I used an air chisel making it relatively simple to remove the skins and a cone cutter to remove the welds that holds the side impact bars. Removing the door skins and the side impact bars will provide a significant weight saving as the door bars alone weigh at least a kilo. Once they were removed I also fitted the rear arches with the rear bumper removed. A significant amount of work needs to be done to remove all the arch to allow the ride height of the car to be dropped to suit the kit. At the front I need about 100mm, at the back it's almost 200mm. I spoke to Kam @ Driftworks and ordered a set of Lexus IS 200 HSD Coilovers which I'm going to be fitting tomorrow and "slamming" the car as low as possible to work out how much of the original arch needs to be removed. I don't want to tub the arches as it'll mean I won't be able to go into Club Class @ Time Attack and have to run with the pros which on it's first outing and with teething problems isn't a good idea.

A good friend of mine called Ray from RMS Jap Works came round this evening and is going to help with some of the fabrication work needed for the front bonnet and welding up the rears when I get to that point. He's done some fabrication work for me before and I highly recommend him. I've slightly jumped ahead of the game buying the Coilovers before the engine is in and before I've worked a lot of the other problems out, but I wanted to get the aesthetics of the car done first. Even if this doesn't end up being the coilovers I end up using for the car longterm I have a nice IS300 which would benefit from a lower stance on coilovers Amazing when you look at the difference of the car it's already starting to take shape and it's only the second day I've been working on it solid. Have to move the petrol fuel cap, the n/s carbon fibre arch goes right over where the oem petrol cap is located so this will need to be moved. Tomorrow I'll be working on the front doors retaining more of the original door to ensure the door handles function correctly. [autoviewer id=10 width=580 height=420 ]