A turbo, a V8, a Supra and no clue

I don't really know much about drifting, but recently a lot of my friends have been building drift cars and going out to have what looks like a hell of a lot of fun. I'm not too keen on the Skylines and Silvias that most of the drifters here in Australia run and have been building Supras for as long as I care to remember so figured I'd start off with a cheap wrecked one.


This is the shell as I bought it, with rails bent quite badly to the left.








I had to get it rolling as a first step to get it off the trailer, so had to get subframes and stuff. Unfortunately I had no 5x114.3 wheels, so I was donated a set of ugly, shit quality Rotas. I will be cutting these up with a 9" grinder at some point.





To make it easier to work on we cut off the front in front of the towers. There was so much weight in the chopped rails!







Got some subframes and got the shitty, poor fitting wheels on so we could get the car off the trailer.






It's low and will be staying stupidly low because apparently that's what drifters do according to my housemate. I bought a set of kei office coilovers from a friend and set them at this height. With Nissan offsets and the inner guard chopped out I could get a 295 tyre under the car at this height. But I won't, because this is a skid pig.





Then it was time to do some shopping.

 

Bought some metal and a dummy LS1 block as my other LS's are complete and are too heavy to lift with one hand to check fitment.




As it had to be retardedly low and have stupid lock I had to do some cutting and welding. I am not a welder, so my welds look shit but they held up to 100kg of my fat arse jumping on them so I think they'll be ok.
I'm going to switch to a Nissan macpherson strut front end using S13 coilovers, Supra knuckles modified with S13 upper mounts to piss off the upper control arm and R33 LCA's and castor arms. This should give it more camber too. Coilovers arrive next week so I'll go into more detail on that later.








I welded on the tube frame base plates and cut off or hammered up any parts that would stop me going retardedly, uncomfortably and poor handling-ly low.





Then I put the LS1 dummy block in, using flipped upper mounts and the stock engine mounts which are 80mm long. It fits, but I'm going to change to 40mm E36 mounts to make it fit better and drop lower. There is just over 50mm of clearance from the back of the block to the firewall this way.





Then I worked out the ride height to check panel clearance.




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S13 knuckles. I'll be chopping off the top mount point on these and welding them to the Supra knuckle.



A GT45, because stupid turbos are getting to be my calling card. Should be good for some proper spastic corner exits.



S13 front coilovers. Courtesy of Khudar from JAK Motorworks.



40 litre fuel cell, Carter lift pump, 5 litre surge and twin 044's.



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Size comparison

 

The guards I had were munted, so I bought Gihan's fibreglass ones to allow me to make up the top bar.



I decided to machine out the R33 LCA's a little bit to allow the Supra bottom camber bolt to be used. Hard to see, but it's there. For anyone that cares, it's a 16mm bolt. Well, 15.94mm according to my verniers.



To increase the lock, I had to modify the stock Supra knuckle to bring the tie rod mount point closer in to the knuckle. Luckily the Ackerman effect isn't changed by doing this as they're dead straight mounts, unlike Silvias & Skylines.
I did this as my first exercise in welding forged cast metal and this was the result;




The pool didn't push into the cast particularly well so I was a bit iffy about running it. I asked around and the consensus was to cut it back off and do a downhill root, uphill filler weld.
I chopped it back off and could immediately see how bad the weld was... funnily enough there are actually a ton of drifters out there that run with this kind of penetration.



So then I went away and learnt what a downhill root weld was, then did the whole chamfer thing and welded it up properly. Result seems a lot better.



Then I lopped off the upper control arm mount and welded on the S13 Macpherson strut mount. Ignore the dirt on the weld.



Then it was a matter of bolting it all up.





There is a surprising amount of room with it all bolted up. The wheels on the front are 18x8.5 + 20 or something and it looks like I could space them out another inch and go an inch wider. There's about 4" of suspension travel as well, even with how stupidly low it is. Oh, and it will take a TON of castor, which should be good for skids or something.





Have some camber. Bottom camber bolt is at 0, top camber plate is also at 0, which gives me tons of room to play.



I also started putting in the fuel system. Boot floors are a tool of Communism, and we must not tolerate the red menace.





I'm still umm'ing and ahh'ing about the rear tubs, as I can't quite tell where they get their structural strength from. It looks like they pull onto the inner chassis rail, but there is a clear press in the panelwork heading to the inner layer of the wheel arch.
I'll probably just get drunk and start hacking away at it. :/

 

I've been working more and more of late, so I've been getting back home too late to be operating grinders and shit. Apparently neighbours and the council don't like the sound of grinders at 11:30PM on a Tuesday night..
So I made a deal with a FIFO worker mate to work on both of our drift cars (which I was doing anyway) in his massive shed out in the sticks with no neighbours to annoy. Means I wasn't constantly carting my tools around as well.

It went onto the trailer with surprising ease this time and fit even with the retarded camber and stupid low.



The two nuggets together. These are both pigs, my mate has an awesome Origin widebody RB26 S13 he's building as a comp car.



Splitting the welder between the two of us. Exhaust flapper on the RB30 180SX and fuel cell mounts for the pig Supra.



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Welding on and testing the strength of the chassis rails. I give no fuck for the alignment so long as it will hold the V mount up.









It also made a great seat.



Then had a play with the turbo positioning.







Basically worked out that I'm going to have to relocate the power steering pump to the drivers side of the motor and then the 4" dump will fit easily. The manifolds are going to be ugly as sin, but the V mount of the radiator and intercooler should keep the intake charge piping really, really short.

... also over head welding after half a dozen Jack Daniels & cokes is pretty hard.

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Some more pictures, because why the hell not.

Macca working on the drivers side now that the passenger side is sorted.







Oh, I'm building two engines at the moment as well. A slap together SR20DE for Kisza and a pretty full house Nitto RB26 for Stu's good drift car (not the yellow 180 nugget)

 

Put the bonnet on so I could start sorting out the V-mount. Surprisingly this is the first time I've used trigonometry since uni.



Block of wood is there to help bend the intercooler bracket into place because I just used the metal that was already on the cooler to mount it up, because honestly I couldn't be bothered getting the drill out. I'm going to pull the bolts out and move it to the top slot so that it gets a less aggro angle and a bit more surface area.





The upper rad support is just tacked on at the moment, now that I know the position of the intercooler mounts I'm going to throw a 45 angle piece in there and chop the corner out so that I can fit the headlight lenses.



Good times.
















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Rolled the Soarer that I'm stripping for various nuts and bolts, steering intermediary shaft, etc into my backyard ready to pull down. If anyone needs any bits, let me know.



As the cage is going in on Monday I had to make sure I knew where the seats and steering wheel were going to be so that I didn't end up with a bloody cage bar running through them.




Bolted in the door handles and mounted the doors up properly. It's a lot easier when you don't care about the paint or panels!



Attached the hatch and bolted the lights in



Hood is back on now. The panel gap to the fibreglass guards is just shocking, but oh well.

 

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

My fab work is crap, for part of it I ran out of MIG gas and just kept welding anyway because I couldn't be arsed driving 15 minutes to go and get my other bottle. I didn't need to do a V mount, but I've never played around with it before and I thought it would be an interesting thing to try out. I didn't do it because I thought it would work better than a conventional setup, I'm just having a bit of fun.

I've been working on this car for about 4 weeks now, so it's not been as quick as it looks here. The fact I haven't measured anything and have made stuff fit by hitting it with a hammer and using scrap steal that I'm not even bothering to clean has made it go a bit quicker. This car won't be legal for competition where I am because of the amount of "tubing" at the front (really just cheap RHS from the local hardware store )

Nope, they're definitely Rotas
I do have a set of genuine TE37's, but they won't be seeing this thing.

That's the joy of this country. Every second family car has an LS in it here!

Yeah, it's stupid, isn't it? It does mean that I've had to put some thought in the steering and suspension geometry though. So again, a learning opportunity

For what it's worth, this was one of my other Supra's, I'm not always a dodgy prick;