So I've been putting off doing any updates on this just because I wanted to actually have something to report but in all honesty I've hardly had any progress other than getting some ideas for how the hell I'm gonna do front brakes and the rear swing arm, the second part shouldn't be too hard.
The main reason for nothing happening is because of school and work, I thought winter quarter was pretty tough but my spring quarter made it look like child's play. I decided to skip intro to statics (not statistics, that's super easy) because it used to be that they covered about 2 or 2.5 chapters in intro and did a long review in just normal statics. Turns out now they cover 4.5-5 chapters in intro to statics so when I came into statics I was about 4.5 chapter behind everyone else. Definitely never skipping a quarter of something again!
However during spring break I did get a bit of work done on my cbr600 which is getting sold soon. I got a bit of the body work done on the fairings and painted two of them. I did white cause that seems to sell well at the moment and since it's riding season hopefully I can catch a pretty good price for the bike. As for the other bike, the gs550, that thing has been the absolute bane of my existence for two years and it's probably getting sold in non-riding condition. The cbr should make up for the loss I take on that bike and honestly never having to see that bike in our garage again is worth a couple hundred dollars haha.
The miata project is still basically in the process of buying lots and lots of parts. I've been doing research on doing this swap for over a year now, and other than electrical it's pretty much all planned out. A couple months ago a ls1 popped up on ls1tech for a good price and honestly I was getting kind of impatient so I jumped on it. It had just over 70k on it, was a 2001 and had a 85mm TB, all the accessories, the only thing missing was the computer and wiring for $1700. I decided to buy it but paypal had other plans for me, they decided to flag my account and take forever working out the problems. The kicker was they didn't even flag the 1700, it was the extra 50 I added for the paypal fees later that they flagged. Anyway the guy got impatient and sold it to someone locally. I was pretty bummed but it wasn't that big of a deal.
Then about a month or two ago a t56 popped up on craigslist for 1000, had under 70k on it and had a 5.0 short shifter on it. I jumped on that faster than hell and picked it up the next morning.
As for progress on the go kart, I got the whole rear end ground off so that there's no evidence that I ever decided to weld my swing-arm to the frame. The deal with my dad is I have to get rid of both of the bikes before I do any major work on the go kart, so that doesn't help much with getting work done haha. I attached the pics of the new swing arm which I'm really pumped that I bought, was an awesome deal and makes my life a ton easier! I also have a gsxr750 monoshock lying around my garage that I think I'll use to give it a tiny bit of travel but not too much.
My idea for the front brakes may be a really really horrible idea but I ain't about to buy an actual front brake kit for go karts, those things are freaking expensive! Basically the idea is to make my own spindles (not hard) that will allow my to push the front wheels out a lot farther that they already are (a couple inches more than they currently are). Not only will this allow me to drop the front end an inch or two by making them drop spindles this will allow me to stick the rotors and calipers from the gsxr750 I mentioned before onto the front end. The picture is the size of the rotor compared to the size of the wheel. The part I'm most worried about is when there's weight on the front end and the tires flex a little, I don't want to be grinding rotors on the pavement haha. We'll see what happens, maybe I'll try to pick up some rear rotors, that would probably work better.
I also am thinking maybe just do a roll bar on the go kart instead of a full cage, a cage is going to make it extremely hard to take the engine out which is something that I'm sure I'll have to do again sometime. Oh and the wood that you see under some of the pictures is the platform we built to put the karmann ghia under, now we're using the volume of the garage instead of just the surface area!
The last thing that's happened around here is that we got a beater truck for hauling our boat up and down the hill to the boat ramp over in eastern WA. We have a really small spot of land with a trailer on it that's nice to go to but when we use the boat we have to take the diesel over there to haul it up and down the hill. This truck will hopefully save some money in the long run and some trouble of hauling the 250 over instead of the miata or something. Also I took the hardtop off the miata finally, it's definitely summer time! That just about sums up the last few months, lots of work, even more school and very minimal fun time to work on stuff. At least I'm only taking calc 3 for summer quarter so I should have a ton more time!
Oh and one last thing I guess, by the end of the month I should have enough saved for an ls3 crate engine, if no good deals pop up then I'm gonna go big I guess. While it's not the most cost efficient option (by far), it's going to make the car exactly what I want and that's what's important, right? I don't want to rush this build like I did with the go kart, if I hadn't rushed the go kart I wouldn't be writing about all the stuff that needs to be done because I would have done it in the first place.
Thanks for reading,
Stewart Kerns
