Thread: The Roofus Special

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That one would be my vote; what's the handle on the drivers side?

I came to the realization that I need to work out some of the function details before I get too much farther with the form. I need to figure out the mechanics of the front half of the car.

I slid the back end of the car back a couple of feet so that I would have room on the table for the motor. I ended up making a saw horse out of a suzuki samurai roll bar.

Originally Posted by falconvan

That one would be my vote; what's the handle on the drivers side?

Its the brake.

Rather than completely trashing the car to try and get the motor to fit under a track nose, I amgoing to stick to the original idea for the car and copy the little blue/gray 1930 RALLY that was pictured earlier.

Here is a front view of a similar car.

I enjoy following this thread. Great project, huge project. Building and designing as you go is tough. This requires alot of time. How do you do it?

Originally Posted by florida

I enjoy following this thread. Great project, huge project. Building and designing as you go is tough. This requires alot of time. How do you do it?

I have a lot of downtime between work sessions (the project is 250 miles or so away from where I live). I have plenty of time to think out the next step.

Occasionally, what I have been thinking and planning doesn't really match up with what I remebered the car/car parts to be.

All projects evolve though, as you do something you think how that affects other pieces and you tweak something else to match....or you see where somebody else did something better and you copy their idea.

Even though this is a scratch build, I don't think it is any more ambitious than of the complete builds documented on this board where somebody started out with an actual car. In fact, mine might be easier since nobody knows waht it SHOULD look like.

Flipper,

I'm more of a lurker, but I have enjoyed your build thread.

As everybody knows, Jay Leno is a huge car guy. He has a website http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/index.shtml where he does a new video segment every week on one of his cars. This week's segment is all about cars in the same style as the Roofus Special so I thought you might enjoy it.

Mark

No pictures to post, but I spent the weekend playing with front end parts. Mostly taking the jag front end apart amd cleaning everything up. Looks like I need to replace lower ball joints on both sides. I also picked up a manual rack and pinion from a Toyota Tercel from Pull-A-Part this morning.

Still sorting out what I want the A-arms to look like.

Anybody have toughts on exhaust pipes?

The stock manifolds are already split and are very header-ish, but they point down. Exhaust pipes would go underneath the steering shaft and then exit the body. If I use the stock manifolds, I think I have 3 basic options:
1) merge into one pipe under the hood and exit through a hole in the famerail and run a single pipe down low on the body.
2) don't merge, run one through the frame, one above the frame like harley drag pipes
3) don't merge, run one through the frame, one above the frame and merge into a single pipe outside of the body

The other option is to ditch the factory manifolds and build headers.

This thing only will have a 210 cubic inch or so inline six in it so it doesn't NEED really big pipes.

Stock manifolds. FYI the tubing scraps between the framerails at the firewall are just spacers for mock-up.


This car is close enough to use as an example for photoshops if anybody is so inclined.

Got my frame rails mostly welded on and the center frame rails cut to length. There will be a round tube spreader bar installed at the very front. Still have to encase them in heavy sheetmetal.

And started on my front suspension.

I found a pretty cool raw material in the junk pile....Uni-strut. I like the factory punched, ebenly spaced oval lightening holes. I cut it down to 1 1/2 x 3/4 channel.

The round tubes that hold the bushings are tractor link bushings from TSC.

The tapered hole for the lower ball joint is from the jaguar parts car.

Way more work than I thought it would be. with all of the trial and error, it took two days for me to figure the first one out.

First I-beam


donor tapered hole


With tapered hole installed


Turning it into an a-arm

Making a unistrut gusset. No lightening holes for the gusset.


Gusset welded in


Tractor bushings cut down to size


The rear bushing end got reinforcement...the holes line up too!

One down. ....three more to go.







Passenger side "kit"


My daughter driving Roofus.

I didn't get nearly as much done over Christmas shutdown as I had planned. Having a chest cold for about a week put a big dent in my plans. This made matters worse. ...the temp is 30 degrees in the shop.



I did manage to get the passenger side i-beam welded up. I quit before it made it to A-arm status.