306 replies to this topic

[Nev]

Heard on the grape vine that someone's stole my idea so will make an update this weekend with how far I've gotten as want to make sure everyone knows I done it first

 

Ha ha, yes, I know who it is, he's at the other end of the country.

 

You can have face off when you've both completed.  

[Mopeytitan]

Heard on the grape vine that someone's stole my idea so will make an update this weekend with how far I've gotten as want to make sure everyone knows I done it first

  Ha ha, yes, I know who it is, he's at the other end of the country.   You can have face off when you've both completed.  

What end of the country Nev? Scotland? I'm moving back up there with work next year Got big plans for mine... ... There is a few on here that know what I'm doing

[chickendippers]

Should be done for early-mid Summer so you have plenty of time yet 

[haggi961]

Your car is like the topic mate, project unknown 😂 I say it's the first to get the engine running in the car is the winner 😃

[Mopeytitan]

Shut up Luke!

[chickendippers]

Challenge accepted! 

[Mopeytitan]

Ok so been a long time since I updated this. Before you get your hopes up this is not the update 😄 but will be writing it up this week. Not done much pic uploading for a while apart from with the phone through Tapatalk. Since the crap with photobucket how is everyone uploading pics now?

Edited by Mopeytitan, 20 November 2017 - 06:42 PM.

[vocky]

I use Imgur for photos now

[Mopeytitan]

:: cheers vocky

[Acidpopstar]

Hawayyy fella... gotta give us more than this! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Nev]

Looking fwd to a proper update Al.

[Mopeytitan]

Ok… So time for an update. I’ve been pretty busy not just with my car but with other projects i’ve had going on for other people. If you can give me a minute to upload everything, i'll probably have to do this in stages.

 

So as a refresher i got the car looking pretty much exactly how i wanted it. It drove lovely sounded nice and to be honest was quite quick! It originally had a SC engine in the back which made a decent 259 or something like that. I had started to cotemplate what i wanted to do next and having been in Nev’s and Haggis cars i had the urge to get it up to around the 400 mark.

 

But me being me i didnt want to go the easy route of forging the engine already in and following everyone else. Well why would i?! Well as a lot of you will know by now, i decided to fit an A28NET engine into the back of my VX. which as it turns out isn’t as easy as it sounds  

 

Because photobucket has fcuked up as a reminder this is what she looked like before i started.

 

 

So my plan was to use a completely standard insignia engine with a hybrid turbo (bigger compressor) and aim somewhere around the 400-450 Bhp mark. This would yield going off the figures that insignias and vectras achieve around 500 lb/ft of torque! That’s a lot!

 

After i had decided i was swapping the engine and convinced the wife it was a good idea (probably the hardest part of the whole build ) i got myself on eBay and started looking for an engine to use. I originally was going to go for the Z28NET but decided on the A28 because it’s 4 cams are all VVT as apposed to only the exhaust or intake (can’t remember which) on the Z28. It didnt take long and i found a decent used engine from an insignia VXR. I bought it and got it delivered. It was missing a few bits and came with the F40 6 speed gearbox for the insignia. And here lay the first hurdle! the insignias are 4x4 so the gearbox wasn’t going to work! It is still a transverse mounted gearbox but it has the transfer box bolted to it and upon removing it the splines were different that the drive shafts!

 

With the engine here i started looking into an ECU to run the engine and decided  on the AEM Infinity 8 as there wasn’t many stand alone ECUS that have the ability to run 4 cams VVT. so £2200 lighter got me this.

 

 

Along with this i started to think about how the fuel tank was too small so pulled the fuel tank took a few measurements of the fuel tank space and graeme knocked this up. Should do the trick. It has two ball valves and fuel tank foam filled. At the same time i took out the fuel pump and upgraded it.

 

 

So i started to look into whether i could fit the F23 gearbox onto it. Nope! Fcuk!

[Mopeytitan]

[font="'Helvetica Neue';font-size:10px;"]This meant it was back on the computer and looking for a F40 gearbox to fit to the engine. Luck has it a Vectra VXR engine and gearbox came up for sale. The engine had a cam chain failure exploding the rocker arms and the guy sold everything as a job lot. So i got the engine wiring loom, sensors, turbo, gearbox, etc! Hired a van took a little trip a long the road with Luke and the wife to pick it up. [/font]

 

With another engine and gearbox back at home i started pulling apart the car i had just spent two years getting to how i wanted it. Clams came off and engine pulled out.

 

 

I ended up selling the insignia gearbox and transfer box and shipped it out and sold the engine and gearbox as a drop in supercharger kit. So the ECU, wiring loom, immobiliser etc went with it.

 

Cleaned up the engine and gave it a quick paint with high temp aluminium silver paint.

 

 

With the SC engine out i trial fitted the engine. which as it turns out doesn’t fit! so i started chatting to Luke about it and came up with the idea of converting it to an exige bodied car, another thing i had to convince the wife of! Doh! I somehow managed to sway her by convincing her i could cover the cost of it by selling my parts Man Maths at it’s finest! If any of you are wondering i haven’t managed to only spend what I’ve made from my bits! not even fcuking close! 

 

So having decided i will change the body i came to the conclusion i couldn’t go with an S2 for two reasons:

1- the wheel base will be shorter and i needed more room in the engine bay 

2- they’re girly looking, isn’t that right Luke ;D

So i had to go for the V6 because it has a longer wheelbase. As can be seen in this pic.

 

So the car was split into three bits.

 

 

I cleaned up the subframe a little and checked on the chassis arms to see what sort of corrosion we had. It wasn’t to bad not the best but not the worst i’ve seen. considering it’s probably not been taking off for 15 years

 

 

I started researching how much bigger the V6 exige was and using Wikipedia (probably not the best source i know). I came up with this:

 

Dimensions for project V6 Exige S

 

91.7 in (2,329 mm) - VX220 Wheelbase

149.2 in (3,790 mm) - Length

67.2 in (1,707 mm) - Width

43.8 in (1,113 mm) - Height

 

90.6 in (2,301 mm) - 2012 Exige S Wheelbase

149.5 in (3,797 mm) - Length

68.0 in (1,727 mm)- Width

5.6 in (1,158 mm) - Height

 

93.3 in (2371 mm) - V6 Exige Wheelbase approx

4084 mm - Length 

1802 mm - Width

1129 mm - Height

 

difference over Exige

70mm longer wheelbase

25mm wider front

38mm wider rear

 

difference over VX220

42mm longer wheelbase

 

So from my guesstimates (they can only be guesstimates because the info came from wiki) i knew i needed to extend the wheelbase by roughly 42mm. I got hold of some 40mm rectangle box section as a temporary measure to allow me to space the subframe and start getting the engine in place. 

 

I bolted the subframe back on and realised now my lower wishbones mounts wont work, so spoke to my welder fabricator friend Graeme (he comes into this a lot from now), gave him the originals and he knocked up a set of 42mm longer ones. Happy days! the extended vx was rolling!

 

 

Got the engine in and made some tubular engine mounts as copied from VXT5’s project (thanks :

 

[Mopeytitan]

[color=rgb(69,69,69);font-family:'Helvetica Neue';font-size:10px;]i started looking into getting V6 clams. Joined Seloc because i figured this would be the best place to get parts from. In the classifieds section Junks had a LH Sill, A panel, Engine lid and rear clam for sale. So sent him a message and organised going to collect them. [/color]

 

I hired a van a took a drive along to collect them, blowing out a tyre, shutting down the M25 clockwise, oops! i probably spent a few hours there chatting with him and discussing my car and told him id be after the rest of the body panels and he said he could get them made for me as he had moulds taken from every panel to supply panels to the lotus race team. I asked him for the remain gin parts which he said he would sort out.

 

I got back home and test fitted the sill and clam.

 

 

This is when i realised how much wider the V6 is than the VX! The ATS wheels used to be slightly outside the wheel arches of the VX clams and now they are sat in 37mm each side! FCUK!!! now i need customs wishbones. You can now imagine the cost rising and rising and rising and rising and so on! A chat with Graeme and he said he could knock some up for me and he’ll order the material through his work so wont cost me much ::! With the rear clam fitted and noticed that my VX hardtop now wont fit (yes i thought it would ) so searching on Seloc i found in the classifieds a guy selling a lotus hardtop for £100 as he had 2 and was moving house and needed it gone ASAP. So snapped that up!

 

 

I got a message from junks that my panels were ready and hired a van and went to pick them up. fortunately a fairly uneventful ride out this time (no blow outs), and popped in on Arctic Monkey to discuss work on his car.

 

 

I started doing some work on the car making an exhaust and some stay bars to take the extended subframe. 

 

 

I was fortunate enough to have gotten the driveshafts with the Vectra VXR engine so i chopped them in half and cut up my Vx ones and joined them together to make a VXR inner with VX outer driveshaft pair. This is where i started to get worried! the angle on the driveshafts was pretty severe and i wasn’t really happy about it. With the sort of torque i’m expecting the engine to produce i wanted the drive shafts as straight as i could get them.

 

I managed to get hold of a set of Ohlins shocks with remote reservoirs for an exile with the plan to use them. But once they arrived i noticed the rears were shorter than the vx rears! as you can see the cars arse is on the floor! so they’re weren’t going to work! 

 

 

I also got hold of a set of front and rear cornering force ARB’s.

 

[Mopeytitan]

[font="'Helvetica Neue';font-size:10px;"]More research! I started to think about a completely custom subframe which would allow me to mount the engine anyway i wanted but then i thought,, the V6 has a bigger engine with a shallower angled V than mine so common sense would have it the engine bay is bigger… I sent Junks a message and asked him if he could get me one. He told me he would look into it and after a month or so he got back to me saying there was no used ones about (well except one that the guy wanted 2k for and he said it was too much). He told me he’d speak to lotus and see what he could do. A couple of weeks later he let me know he had ordered one for me and one for himself because if they were making one they might swell make a couple.[/font]

Another couple of weeks went by and he had it. At this point i was busy working on Arctic Monkeys car because i was fortunate enough for him to smash his car up being a shitty driver and he bought all my VX panels. 

 

When i had finally finished stuarts car (i say finished, finished to a point where he could take the majority of it so i could do some work on mine), he picked up a few bits i had started collecting at Junks house and brought them with him. This included the subframe.  

 

 

I pulled the Vx subframe off and fitted the new V6 subframe. And guess what the fcuking engine mounts now don’t fit! this is because Lotus decided to use some stupid little rubber thing on the RH side and had a bracket fitted to the LH side with a crazy looking engine mount. 

 

I made a bracket to fit to the LH side which allowed me to use the standard Vx mount then ordered 3 different mounts from different cars that i thought might work, none of them did! they were all to big! so back to eBay and found another i thought might work and it did! finally a little bit of luck going my way!

 

With the engine in i started to look into the wishbones. I already knew the fronts weren’t going to work and would require new ones so i was going to get these made. The rears in Lotus’ infinite wisdom again the mounting points are wider than the Vx ones but funnily enough the vx ones actually fitted and sat the wheels in the right place but obviously couldn’t be used because bushes are about 50% to narrow. This got me thinking about what to do. I messaged junks and asked for a price on V6 wishbones. not going to be cheap i know but thought id ask. then luck went my way again! a crashed V6 at a breakers yard on eBay! i offered them 2k for the full set of wishbones and did they get back to me? did they Fcuk! 

 

Then randomly searching eBay (as you do) the breakers yard had put them all up! so went through them all and of the £2k i offered them i got:

 

- Rear upper and lower wishbones

- Rear uprights

- Front upper and lower wishbones (except drivers upper, which was broken in the crash)

- Front uprights

 

The wishbones only came to £1100. Idiots! lost out on money there! They also had the full brake kit for £800 (all 4 corners), the 6 speed gear change with gear cables and the ABS pump, so i bought them as well.

 

The only problem was i was still missing the drivers front upper. Message to junks sorted that and got a brand new one from lotus : : 

 

Now with the subframe the exhaust i had made wouldn’t work because the mounts are in the completely wrong place and i wasn’t happy with the design so came up with a new design that was more like the exiges exhausts.

 

 

A change of plan on the power brought around a change in the exhaust. The exhaust when finished will be a 3.5” downpipe from a Garret GTX3076 turbo through a reducer to 3” and through the back box. At the reducer there will be a 2.25” bypass pipe controlled by a vacuum operated valve to allow a small portion of the exhaust gas to bypass the back box making the exhaust louder. The plan is to have a sport button that opens the exhaust valve just for some more noise. And a race button that will also open the valve and at the same time upping the boost. the new plan for the engine is to forge it and aim for somewhere around the 550-600 make in the high boost mode and a low boost of around 450 mark.

 

 

Few days later the wishbones arrived on a pallet. The drivers steering arm was missing and the company had hacked one of the toe arms on the rear! looks like they took an angle grinder to it when removing the wishbones! so a new toe arm from lotus was ordered and elise parts light weight steering arms ordered.

With the engine in i knocked up the front and rear engine mounts, stay bar mounts and stay bars, because as you can imagine the ones i had already made don’t work!. I made these out of 1mm steel to use as templates and took them into Graeme to be made out of 3mm steel. At the same time as knocking these up i gave hime the dimensions of the rear lower wishbone mounts so he could knock them out at the same time. Another thing i had noticed with the exile subframe that lotus decided to change was how the rear shocks mount. The upper part of the shocks bolt to a bracket that then bolts to the subframe! These are 160 odd each from lotus and on back order, so i made som cardboard templates and took them to graeme to be made at the same time as the other brackets.

 

An upcoming move to Scotland mid next year has put a bit of a rush on the body work as this winter will be my last chance to get the paint done so have made a start on the body work. I decided i wanted to go with a design similar to this.

 

 

But rather than just black vinyl my stripes will be carbon fibre bonded to the body work. The rear clam i got form junks had had a knock on the rear right and had the cut out for engine cooling in the back. Junks is currently getting me the centre section with the high level brake light made so i cam cut to shape and bond in. I have had to repair the parts where the race cars fire extinguisher etc buttons are and the cup r spoiler upright holes. 

 

the damage to the right had been repaired but on looking closer i noticed it wasn’t the best repair so took it all away and started again. fibre glassed over it and started the long process of sand filler sand filler and so on.

 

 

Also got a carbon spoiler from the states and a carbon diffuser surround and exile diffuser.

 

 

 

This is basically where were up to. I’’m sure over missed loads and it may or may not be in the correct order of how things happened or make any sense at all, but you get the idea. I think ill have to start keeping up to date with this as its hard work trying to remember everything.

 

[Mopeytitan]

Also got a set of Team dynamics wheels for an exige v6

 

[Mopeytitan]

And last one some carbon bonded and smoothed on the LH sill.

 

 

masking tape showing what the pattern will look like

Edited by Mopeytitan, 26 November 2017 - 10:58 PM.

[Zoobeef]

Awesome.

[haggi961]

Looking good mate and glad you went with the bigger and heavy s3 Exige 😁

[Mopeytitan]

Will be popping in to see Graeme today and hopefully my brackets will be finished. This will allow me to get the suspension all bolted up and get the 3000km v6 shocks I’ve got sat in a box upstairs on. Then I’ll chuck some cheap dog poop tyres on the wheels to get it back on its wheel so I can roll it in and out the garage again. So hopefully this weekend I’ll have some pics of it on its wheels outside. First time in a year it’ll have been on wheels!