Time to start documenting this car, because I'm actually working on it now, this way I can keep all my photos and notes in one place.

I bought this car almost 3 years ago complete, but it had been sitting un-covered for nearly 10 years in the desert outside Palm Springs. It was originally an Arizona car before that.

The gear-primary 4-speed in the car ate one of the syncro tension springs, which was the reason it was parking in the first place. It didn't take a ton to get it running again, and I was able to drive it around briefly, but brother David and I had always had the intention to build it into a race car.

Then it got flat-towed out here to LA with me for the build, I have a bay off in the corner in Walter's shop that I have outfitted pretty decently now.

VIDEO PROOF

Then found out the brake master was totally shot, threw in a used one (from Jordan I think, don't remember, that was also a little too far gone), and that was good enough motivation to call it quits and start the teardown and just put a real braking system in it later:








So the tear down started - you guys up in New England will probably cry about how little rust repair this little '73 needed - absolutely ZERO, the thing is perfect, where I scraped through the undercoating a little too hard all you get is gleaming galvanized panels staring back at you, it's amazing.....

















HUUUUGE pile that came out of the car - all the interior parts were too sun-damaged to warrant keeping.






All the money that came back out of the car!

Then the fun started - cut out all the extra mounting brackets, rear seat mounting rail, the door, hood, and rear decklid skins, and scraped out all the sound deadening material.

I decided to leave the sound deadening in the floor panel, it's sun-baked on enough that I think the only way to stay sane and remove it would be the liquid nitrogen route, but renting a commercial decanter here in our part of town with my few industry connections will be a little more expensive than it makes sense, especially since the road-race cage I need to put in will weigh quite a bit less than the rally cages most of you guys need, plus I don't need to reinforce nearly as much in the suspension hardpoint areas or the links themselves, so I don't feel too bad about it.









I got one of those awesome little spot weld holesaws from McMaster, you have to go pretty slow with it, the carbide saw is easy to break teeth off if you get rambunctious with an air drill, but that thing is damn useful.... I ordered a couple multipacks of inserts and guide arbors to go along with it.

All the nasty glue for the paper and tar sound deadening came out pretty easily just by scrubbing with a rag soaked in gasoline, assisted by a paint/drywall scraping spatula, once it got down through the muck the original paint started to shine through.

I was originally going to paint the whole interior light grey along with the cage, but the original paint looks so nice with all the adhesive off I think I am just going to mask off the panels and paint the cage tubing a light color when it's mostly in and starts getting tacked in place.

And now for the stuff that's actually new!

Yesterday I started work on the cage. It's all going to be 1.75"x0.095 4130 airframe tubing, I got a good deal on it locally that included delivery. Gussets and mounting plates are a mix of mild sheet, and 1.0"x0.065 4130 tubing.

I bought a floor tube bender and hole saw notcher from http://www.Pro-Tools.com, they are both decent, the bender is not the easiest to use, especially by yourself, but it can be done. I had help with the main hoop (about 13' uncut length), which was also the first thing I did with the bender, but I was able to do the halo hoop by myself (about 11' uncut).

I got the 6" radius tubing die set to go with it, and that's the radius everything on the cage will be.

I went with the 1.75x0.095 rather than 1.5x0.120 to help with welding penetration (I am going to Tig the whole thing regardless) and to get joint rigidity up - they were almost exactly the same price here. My tubing order was 4 x 17' lengths of 1.75x0.095 + 1 x 1.0"x0.065 was something like $480 with free delivery, plus my assorted 0.125" and 0.065" sheet, some 0.049 5053 sheet, some 2" square stock for seat mounts, and like 10' of 1.5" angle iron for good measure.

I think the whole order was something like $700-$775 or thereabouts delivered to my shop, I got everything from Industrial Metal Supply, a chain of 3-4 distribution centers around Southern California, they were pretty easy to deal with, and were willing to put my small order in and transfer material from another warehouse for no charge.

Industrial Metal Supply

Lookin' good!

A rust free early 99, and you are cutting it up? I'm so jealous!

Continued my trend and got more done today, finished both forward downstays:

Nice work, its looking great. I can definatly appreciate the amount of time and effort you are putting in! Not usually a fan of yellow cars, but that yellow looks really great on the 99. It will really look great with the minilites on it too.

Thanks! I'm actually having a lot of fun finally getting the fab work underway (but it's also the beginning of the project.... :) I thought the color matched the car pretty well myself, when I got it it had the medium green interior but had red front seats - it was pretty laughably aweful (*ahem*... = awesome) I think the paint will come back pretty decent, I spend about 10 minutes on a spot on one of the doors with some rubbing compound to see what it would look like and the oxidation buffed right out, richened the color up a little.

I am thinking I'm gonna do the cage tubing in like a medium grey, leave the interior yellow, and it'll get the factory lightning swoosh up the side and around the rear window kink in blue, it'll be pretty hard to miss which country it was made in that way!

I think it'll look good with the 8-spokes too, sit down real low with a stiff tarmac suspension and no bumpers, should be a lot of fun.


There's good photo shoot potential out front of our shop now that we're done painting it!

I got both rear stays made and notched into the rear bulkhead, they come down right about on top of where the rear upper spring perch is, I will put up a photo later.

Also ordered another 2 lengths of 1.75"x0.095" 4130-N tubing .... and paid [strike]$6.32/ft!![/strike] ----> tubing came this morning, it actually came to $5.59/ft delivered.

I can't recommend Industrial Metal Supply enough if you're in the southern California area, even that small two length order qualified for free delivery to our shop.

Best,
Drew

Hi Drew,great job...I have the same year, model and color..I have the d jetronic.Is yours carburated? Lookin good..joe

No, the original D-Jet was removed before I got the car and swapped with a non-lambda K-Jet system.

I am going to run Trionic5 and a 16v engine in it when all is said and done, but I still have the K-Jet jazz if I need to put it all back if I reaaaaalllly wanted to run a period- or vintage event that had to have the factory fuel delivery back in it.

Most of this car when it's done won't be model 99 anymore except for the cool bodywork.

Best,
Drew

73 s RULE... j