Continuing Work on the MR2 (it's a longtail now)

Ya boy's back in the kitchen.

I've just finished editing the video so go check that out if you want, but as always I took a few photos throughout the process and so I've got this post to compliment the video with a little extra dialogue.

It was fun having a break from Japanese paperwork and actually living in the 21st century, but now it's back to business and I've got an MR2 that's demanding attention.

While I've been editing up all the videos for the Mx5 that I've been posting over the past few weeks, in the background I'd started printing off the final mould for the group C build.

Before I get to deep into the actual work it's worth mentioning that this rear clamshell I'm printing is actually not the same one in all the earlier renders.

If you remember the renders, I went for a short tail style rear end on this car with a large chassis mounted spoiler hanging off the back. Over the past few months, Stan has actually helped me in redesigning the rear end for a long wheelbase, by shifting the axle 150mm further back, giving the car much more 'group C' feeling proportions.

One thing that came up in my research was Shaken which is the Japanese vehicle inspection. According to some sources, a rear wing is not allowed to extend something like 100mm past the rearmost edge of the bodywork. And in my case the wing stuck out about 400mm from the rear bumper.

Additionally, the slightly shorter wheelbase on the MRS and the location of the windshield was really making this car feel like an homage to a group C car, and missing the real proportions.

Lastly, with the engine swap we've been considering for this car, the Toyota 2GR V6, if the rear axle is kept in the same location, you end up with nearly no space around the engine for access.

Because of all these reasons both Stan and I agreed that the best course of action would be to pull the rear wheels back 150mm and extend the body with the more classic longtail style bodywork.

Stan of course being wiser than me had this idea from the start and he was always going to do this on his own version once I finished mine, but I think me being stubborn about wanting to keep the wheelbase the same was going to cause more issues than if we just changed it, and I'm glad we did.

I still thing the short tail can look great on some of the real world group C cars, but I think this extra length has really helped this to stop feeling like a baby group C, and more like a real group C car.

The interesting thing to note is that the actual length tip to tip is actually a tiny bit shorter than it was before, the wing aerofoil is still mostly in the same exact position. But with the bodywork, the new length of the rear clamshell is 195cm

To mark that out on the car:

And so to continue with the gluing process, I really think I've gotten the hang of this. Even without an enclosure these prints were coming out with next to no warping. Across the entire 40 pieces of this mould I only had 2 areas where the warping was worse than a mm.

The filament I've used so far has been PLA, PLA+, PLA+ rapid, PLA matte, all from Elegoo. I think out of all of these the rapid (white) probably preformed the best, the print time was the same for all of them, but the rapid seemed to have more dimensional consistency while it was cooling down. The PLA+ would shrink while it was printing and start to pull off the bed.

Thanks to how good all these prints came out, the whole mould only took 1 week to glue together. But that's with the heat here kicking my ass and having me go back inside for a drink to cool down every 30 minutes or so.

Before I knew it the 2 halves were glued together. It never gets old just how insanely massive every one of these pieces is.

Now that the video's finished I'm going to get straight into prepping that inside surface for a mould. I'll need to order a bit more resin I think.

Also nobody acknowledge the second Suzuki Twin in the background, you didn't see anything.