Kitcar build up

Its time to add some words and pictures for the kitcar build thats currently going on out in the garage. This is meant to be my engine fund for the drift car so I'm trying to put a reasonably spec'd kitcar together on a budget. The base kit is a Tiger Cat E1 that was sold to me as a barely started unfinished project almost three years ago but has taken a back seat whilst I worked on other things. Now is the time to build and finish it.

Here's how it stood in the garage 3 years ago:

Since then the chassis has been sat outside the garage and the bodypanels have been in storage.

The first decision I'd made when I restarted the project was that the rear end was a complete mess and just a mass of tubes that linked up to a heavy Sierra rear suspension setup had to go. So the cutting wheels were unleashed and the whole rear section from the back of the passenger area was cut off and cast aside. I'd also decided that the front of the chassis was a bit too square and front lower chassis member needed to be raised and tapered in under the nosecone to give it a neater look from the front. The standard Tiger nosecone is slightly twisted so I've mounted that up rigidly to the chassis and it's been sat in place for a couple of months to try and take the twist out of it, I heated up the rear edge too as it was slightly wider than the chassis, rachet strapping it in place whilst it was warm pulled it in to line up neatly.

Over the last week I've been tidying up the area that sits in front of the scuttle panel. The original chassis design used a Ford pedal box mounted above the chassis which is extremely awkward and untidy. Needless to say the whole pedalbox was cut out to make way for a nice floor mounted pedal box with bias bar brakes. There is no longer anything above the chassis rails infront of the scuttle panel which will give me more space to mount some reservoirs for the brakes and cooling system.

Another change to the original design was for the steering column. The original used a standard Sierra column as is and simply mounted on two simple tabs on the chassis tubes. This allowed a great deal of flex in the column and the bearings in the column housing were pretty sloppy. I decided to strip the column completely to its two main component parts. Now the plan is to mount the column in a 30mm kart rear axle bearing and carriers to a stiffer bracket mounted on the chassis. This also allows me to have the option to move the column out slightly to bring it in line with the seat position.

The original Tiger seats intended for the car were, to be kind, rubbish! They consisted of two blocks of foam that simply sat in the cockpit so I bought two fibreglass shell seats and a pair of OMP sliding seat rails instead. The seat rails had to be modified slightly to make them longer by about 15mm and wider by 37mm to fit the mounts on the seats. The original tubes for the seats were cut out of the chassis and replaced by two tubes mounted 15mm higher to ensure that the nuts used to hold the seats in place weren't the lowest part of the car.

Hopefully in the next couple of days my English axle will turn up along with some wheels so I can get on with building a new rear end for the car and get the chassis work finished. The next thing to source is a Vauxhall XE engine... watch this space.