Japan + Chimera update

So as yall know I had a couple weeks off for a holiday with my family in Japan. It was great being back and I can't even describe how peaceful it was over there.

The goal of the trip was just to do a bunch of fun stuff with my brother so not really much car stuff since I'm the only one in the family with this mental illness.

Mostly the focus of the trip was to muck around in Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo and do all the cliché touristy things like feed the deer at Nara and see all the Torii gates at the Fushimi Inari Taisha. But we also hit up Universal Studios and Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea. It was my first time at any type of park like that so overall it was pretty sick.

Speaking of sick, hahaha, yeah I got the flu or something on the last couple days of the trip which rocked me for a few days still after I got back but that didn't stop me getting started on something that I've been wanting to work on with the Chimera for ages.
 

So I've been really focusing on the front of this car for a while now, and while it's still not even close to finished, I can't help but feel like it's super out of balance right now and so it's time for BIG GAY WING

This wing should come as no surprise to anybody, it's been in the sketch since day 1 and I'll agree that it's a pretty big part of the design of the car.

My main inspiration for this wing is the insane spoilers on RWB Porsches along with the end plate designs on a lot of Formula 1 cars, but also a specific rendering from an artist I follow on Instagram called Andreas Richter @richter.cgi who does some absolutely amazing cyberpunk work.

To mount the wing to the car I'll be attaching it to the central sharkfin, but because I'm not to confident that will be strong enough on its own, I'm also designing the end plates to wrap around and mount to the car as well.

It took a few iterations until I found a design I liked but once I had the CAD prototype sorted I could begin bending the shapes out of some mild steel I had lying around.

The patina on the steel matched the look of the build so perfectly but the plan was never to keep it on the car. I leave this thing out in the rain and so it would just rust immediately plus this was way too thin to do anything so after I had it bent to shape I used it as my template to build the actual end plates out of fiberglass.

For the end plates I went for 4 layers of 450 gsm, applied 2 at a time and then a surface tissue applied over top for a nice finish. This left the final piece about 5mm thick which when all paired together felt pretty solid.

I forgot to get any photos of making the central piece, but it was pretty simple, I just used a flat piece of polycarbonate between the sharkfin and the wing and then fiberglassed over all of them to make one piece to join them together.

You can see I also made a couple plates to hold the upper wing portions in place in the middle. This was actually a really cool design piece that I liked and really needed a car as insane as this Mx5 to get an opportunity to do.

For the keen eyed viewers, that black upper wing is actually the original spoiler from V1 of this build, I cut it in the middle to match the width of the new wing and you can see just how much wider this new wing is to the original. The total width of this new wing comes in at just a hair over 1.8m wide, with the car itself being about 1.85m wide at it's widest point.

Even though it was comically large and already insane looking, I wanted to add a couple vents in to the end plates just to break up some of the empty space.

I could have easily just bent these vents into the metal form when I was making the original shapes and saved myself about 2 days of work but I'm kinda bad at using my brain some times and I was actually fighting 2 different illnesses while making this video. Right now I seem to have caught a cold which is sweet.

With the fiberglassing complete I could finally do what people come to my channel for and that's throw some bodyfiller on these bad boys and get to sanding.

Ready for a first quick coat of primer to show much how much more work I've got to do.

And that gets us fully up to date with everything going on here in the shop.

I'll leave these to cure over night and then chuck them on the car in the morning and get started editing the video to have it up by next Sunday at the usual time.

Be sure to watch the next video to see them fitted on the car. They'll be staying in primer for now just like the front fenders. The car's going to be a bit of a patchwork project for a while until I've got all the new pieces made.