It's looking good and might just have to be my next project if it is hatched, like the design so far so should prove to be interesting when you get the body and it mounted on the frame!!
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It's looking good and might just have to be my next project if it is hatched, like the design so far so should prove to be interesting when you get the body and it mounted on the frame!!
Some good publicity out there...
Saleen S7 pedigree really adds street cred...
https://www.autoblog.com/amp/2019/12...tory-five-f9r/
MK3.1 2004 Mach 1 donor. ABS, PS, TC.
GTM #304 LPE 525hp LS3
2000 C5 Lingenfelter LS1@489hp
1999 Corvette FRC/Z06 track car
Important thing is does that it come with all the parts as shown in the picture or at least an option to buy with all the body parts.
And I think someone mentioned how are the seals and doors and windows and is it rain ready.
Mostafa
While it would be awesome to believe that the doors and windows will make a perfect seal, I think we need to be realistic here. Look at the door and window seals in your production car. They are all custom moulded to exactly fit the door opening and window opening and just the seals alone probably have tens of thousands of dollars of R&D invested in them along with more tens of thousands of dollars in production moulds to make the seals. This is a kit car. IMO, it would be great if you can create a reasonable seal with the doors and windows with some off-the-shelf universal weatherstripping.....but in reality, I think this is a bit much to ask for if you don't want the kit price to be $50k+.
I can't help but recall when the 2nd Gen Ford Probe came out. I was a mechanic at a Ford dealership at the time. We had dozens and dozens of those things come in the door because the windows would not seal properly. That was on a brand new production car built on an assembly line with tons and tons of R&D invested and custom moulded seals just for that specific car.
Shane Vacek
VRaptor SpeedWorks, LLC
www.vraptorspeedworks.com
Turn-key GTM, SL-C & Ultima GTR Built to Your Specs!
Offering a full line of GTM Upgrades and Custom Parts
The nice thing about designing a body from scratch on a computer and then replicating it very accurately on a 5 axis gantry mill is that you have the opportunity to take an off the shelf rubber seal profile and design the door and body contour to work well with that standard rubber seal and not the other way around. To do it properly might take quite a few hours of CAD work but I would like to think that a custom part would not be needed to get a very high end seal. I know I am making this sound very straight forward and simplistic and it is not. But hopefully these sort of detail areas will be given the attention they deserve.
Mike............
FFR2100 - 331 with KB supercharger - T5 - 5 link rear 3.08's and T2 Torsen.
This leads to one area that I think could bite FFR in the *** a bit. During the FB live video session, it sounds like they are making the body openings and doors/hood/hatch to size with CF finished edges. I'm a real stickler for body gaps......I work very hard to get everything on the GTM bodies fitted so that there is virtually zero gap between the hood and body, doors and body, hatch and body....and then after everything is hinged and latched and body is adjusted to final position.....then I go thru and gap everything to the same gap all the way around so that everything is about as close to perfect as it can get. If the doors and hatch and hood are already moulded to size (instead of oversized like on the GTM doors) that is going to make everything super-critical as far as fitting the body to the chassis, the doors to the chassis and body, hood to chassis and body, etc. If you end up with a gap that's too big or too small....there's not going to be any way to fix it.
On the flip side, if the body doesn't require hundreds of hours of bodywork, I guess that spending some extra time messing around with the location/placement of the body and adjusting door/hatch/hood hinges and strikers might be a good trade-off. Time will tell here.
Shane Vacek
VRaptor SpeedWorks, LLC
www.vraptorspeedworks.com
Turn-key GTM, SL-C & Ultima GTR Built to Your Specs!
Offering a full line of GTM Upgrades and Custom Parts
Road and Track Came out with this:
https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-car...ered-supercar/
FFR 5369 Pin Drive, IRS, Trigos, Torsen, Wilwoods, FMS BOSS 302 "B" cam , Mass-flo. CA SB100 (SPCN) Registered
Delivered 4/23/06. "Finished" 4/2012 (still not done!)
OEMs seem to be able to do it, even when "plastics" are used. What I do know is that this is not going to be a $20k kit. If this is a CF body, that fits right from the get go, customers are going to pay for that. I assume that the CF parts will be epoxy based? If so, this should help with shrinkage irregularities as epoxy resin is known to shrink much less than polyester. This could help significantly with parts fitting much better right out of the molds.
Shane. I'm thinking that the seals should contact the door shut profiles and not the outer skin or edges that ultimately provide the body gaps. So the inner door molding / panel, the door shut molding, and not the door skin or roof / fender / side panel. I agree that it might be good to have the door skin slightly over-sized to be able to fine tune the gaps. FFR tried adding the ability to independently adjust the panels on the 818 and that didn't work out quite to plan. They have a lot of experience with these challenges on existing designs so should hopefully have the insight to make things a lot less troublesome this time around. Getting those details right is what will ultimately make the car worth a higher price.
Mike............
FFR2100 - 331 with KB supercharger - T5 - 5 link rear 3.08's and T2 Torsen.
Doing hand lay up on such a large part with epoxy would be very challenging. In a reasonable production volume the use of resin infusion would be a perfect process for the body molding. It would also allow for the inclusion of foam core sandwich areas to the roof and hood to add stiffness and strength. Doing the body well, and to a budget, is by far the biggest challenge on this project. FFR has the chassis stuff well under control.
Mike............
FFR2100 - 331 with KB supercharger - T5 - 5 link rear 3.08's and T2 Torsen.
All this being said, I have experienced aligning steel OEM doors that were fine and fitted properly when they came off the vehicle I was working on and it was not an easy task. They make it look easy on the factory production lines, but it is not. No matter what some people will have issues aligning doors even if they are matched perfectly to the rest of the bodywork. Being able to grind your way to fitment, while convenient, is not necessarily the right way to have a properly finished product.
Yeah...sorry if my reply was confusing as I was not talking about the door seals at all in that post...just the fitment of the doors in relation to body gaps. I guess to bring that full circle to the door seals (which is what I was thinking about when I was posting about the door gaps but didn't really get back to door seals) is that if they think they can make all the door gaps come out right, then the door seal areas should also stay consistent so that you could use the same profile of generic foam bulb seal on every car and it should work.
Shane Vacek
VRaptor SpeedWorks, LLC
www.vraptorspeedworks.com
Turn-key GTM, SL-C & Ultima GTR Built to Your Specs!
Offering a full line of GTM Upgrades and Custom Parts
Car looks great I don't like the front end, lines do not match the car, would be cool to go with a smaller motor and add AWD.
Anyone who think the car in above picture will cost 50K is crazy and has never done kit car, I think if one adds all the pennies, trip to store, shipping of part, body work, paint, mods, engine , trany, new parts, is well over 80K and 100K will not be hard at all, and this is not adding the time, so personally I would rather spend more money out front instead of fighting all the fitness carzynes later and not get it right. Body should have alignment point to frame and checked before shipment so it fit to body at it is supposed too or accruent enough that fits without checking, it is 2020 and not 2007 when GTM was built, it must have much better quality and fitment!
None of my cars have air gaps for for noise or rain, I do not think we need to excuse this, we should ask for better, I have no issue for paying more for it, if you add all the cost and pain that the customer pay to fix these thing, it will cost 1/10 if FF5 does it since they can do in volume.
Thanks,
Mostafa
The appeal of this car to me is the lightness of it. Styling is very good, but not enough for me if it weighs as much as a bloated OEM car. I believe a car can be both safe and exhilarating without 1000 pounds of nannies and government issued 'necessities'.
FFR is saying lay the CF body on (more or less) and go driving. That's OEM territory but doable in 2020. Especially with computer/CAD/3d manufacturing. It's easy to clone the male and female mating surfaces of an OEM door so you can use an OEM door seal.
I have alluded to this before, I would recommend FFR not try to manufacture anything that already exists in the OEM realm. ie windshield, side windows, dashboards, door cards. Make the door to fit a POS Honda Civic door card and it can be customized to be better than an Aston Martin door card. Use a Nissan 350Z trunk hinge rather than a CAD designed hinge. Headlights are hard to produce in-house. Lamborghini did this with Nissan 300zx headlights in the 90s. Modify existing OEM products as much as possible because they have millions of dollars of R&D already invested and there's no cost or penalty to incorporate them.
Last edited by beeman; 12-14-2019 at 01:53 AM.
MK3.1 2004 Mach 1 donor. ABS, PS, TC.
GTM #304 LPE 525hp LS3
2000 C5 Lingenfelter LS1@489hp
1999 Corvette FRC/Z06 track car
Alan,
I think it looks a lot like the C8 Long Beach red...
https://gmauthority.com/blog/gm/chev...terior-colors/
I don't know about others, but I'm referring to the actual kit price.....not what it will take to build a complete car. Again....I think if they can actually make this work and be so consistent that all of the parts are made to size with the door/hatch/hood gaps already built into the parts....that should be plenty of consistency to where they should be able to come up with a decent, repeatable door and window seal that will work on all F9's...using "off-the-shelf" universal weatherstripping products. With that said, I think that expecting to be able to run the car thru a car wash or pressure washer with zero leaks is....IMO....maybe a bit more than we should expect.....unless you want to pay that $50k price for just the kit alone. That is what I was getting at.
Shane Vacek
VRaptor SpeedWorks, LLC
www.vraptorspeedworks.com
Turn-key GTM, SL-C & Ultima GTR Built to Your Specs!
Offering a full line of GTM Upgrades and Custom Parts
Just to clarify, there are going to be two models of this vehicle...an F9 and an F9R. The F9R will be the race version of the F9. This will follow what FFR has done with recent offerings such as the Coupe, Roadster, and 818 where they offered both the street kit and the race kit versions.
To Crash's point.....surely I'm not the only one who noticed during the "live" FB unveiling that there were dozens of "front end" renderings hanging on the wall behind them? I gathered that the front end of the car they showed was the F9R.....and I'm guessing that one of those renderings on the wall might be close to what will become the F9 "street version" front bodywork?
Shane Vacek
VRaptor SpeedWorks, LLC
www.vraptorspeedworks.com
Turn-key GTM, SL-C & Ultima GTR Built to Your Specs!
Offering a full line of GTM Upgrades and Custom Parts
I'm guessing this will be a non-donor build? Just a few OEM drivetrain components?
MK3.1 2004 Mach 1 donor. ABS, PS, TC.
GTM #304 LPE 525hp LS3
2000 C5 Lingenfelter LS1@489hp
1999 Corvette FRC/Z06 track car
I couldn't be more impressed with the engineering that FFR has been presenting. Mr. Smith has one of the best jobs in the world in my opinion and is doing it in style. Now that I bought a Type 65 Coupe, when may I order the FFR GT40 replica?
Looks like the street nose has been modeled and is sitting on the table in front of the silver scale model. You just get a glimpse of it in the video.
This is not a project I'm interested in building (more hot-rodder than super car) but its fun to follow the development. I imagine the design technology they are using will help them bring more new models and revisions to existing models to market faster and cheaper.
-Steve
Mk IV #8901 - Complete kit, Coyote, TKO-600, IRS. Ordered 5/23/16, Delivered 7/14/16, First Start 8/13/17, First Go-Kart 10/22/17, Registered and Completed 10/18/18. Build Thread: http://thefactoryfiveforum.com/showt...V-Coyote-Build Graduation Thread: https://thefactoryfiveforum.com/show...-Roadster-8901
A lot of the comments on here make it sound like this is done deal including many of the design details. Dave stressed several times in the video this is still a concept design and they won't make any final decisions, including whether it's even released for production, until after they receive the full size body and do more reviews. I think it's safe to say the final version, if there is one, will have changes. So maybe too soon to micro-analyze. Don't know if this fits in my wheelhouse or not. See what happens. But it is pretty amazing how this company has matured even in the past 10 years or so I've been observing.
Last edited by edwardb; 12-18-2019 at 07:00 AM.
Build 1: Mk3 Roadster #5125. Sold 11/08/2014. Build 2: Mk4 Roadster #7750. Sold 04/10/2017. Build Thread
Build 3: Mk4 Roadster 20th Anniversary #8674. Sold 09/07/2020. Build Thread and Video. Build 4: Gen 3 Type 65 Coupe #59. Gen 3 Coyote. Legal 03/04/2020. Build Thread and Video
Build 5: 35 Hot Rod Truck #138. LS3 and 4L65E auto. Rcvd 01/05/2021. Legal 04/20/2023. Build Thread. Sold 11/9/2023.
I vote that Edwardb builds the first one... That way we'll all have a build manual to go by if we want to build it.
I’m with you Ed. Agree there will be changes. But the development over the past 20 years that I have been watching has been impressive. It started with that CD. Haha. I’d bet this project gets delivered. Changes from the prototype sure.. but this thing is pretty far along.
It’s going to be fun to watch no doubt.
After 4 cars you probably could build this thing with your eyes closed
XTF #2
build start date June 19 2023
GTM # 344
Build Start December 2010
First track day April 2013
Or Valarra Vette https://valarra.com/
I never was impressed with the Vaydor...
Last edited by beeman; 12-29-2019 at 12:23 PM.
MK3.1 2004 Mach 1 donor. ABS, PS, TC.
GTM #304 LPE 525hp LS3
2000 C5 Lingenfelter LS1@489hp
1999 Corvette FRC/Z06 track car