Tofu Auto Works

So you guys all know the drill whenever I don't update for a while, it's because I've been working my tuchus off just trying to get whatever I'm doing on the car finished. In the last update we finished off the front making the new flares, headlights, and oil cooler. This time we're moving around th

I think half the reason I'm so bad at posting is because I never really know how to start these things. But I still like to accompany my "early" access videos (when I'm not finishing them 2 hours before my deadline) with some pretty pictures if I can remember to take them throughout the process. I'v

In the latest video I teased the latest addition to the tofu garage, my new Suzuki Twin which for now will serve as my grocery getter and daily runabout. Released in 2003 and only sold for 2 years, there are only around 10,000 of these gems left in existence making it one of the rarest production ke

At long last, it's finally time to reveal the colour for this Stagea. I know some of you were already probably expecting this and I had a handful of people guess it already. I wanted to pick something from Nissan's OEM lineup that was unique but also quite classy. It was a toss up between this and 2

So another month of solid progress, I started off with the widebody mould that I had to remake. In the last update I had made a new plug and was working on smoothing it all out to make a new mould from. I got that all finished and polished up and then was ready to remake the mould. While I was doing

Quite a lot has been going on the past month. You'll have noticed I dropped the every 2 week upload schedule on YouTube while I focus on actually wrapping this build up, and since we're still a little ways off I'll get you awesome patreon supporters up to speed. So catching up with what I went over

See previous post o_o

I would use the Poll feature but that doesn't let me add any photos. So you guys decide, should these GTR hood vents be left as carbon fiber or colour matched to the rest of the car? Carbon Fiber: Pros: - Cabo fibah - Looks like every other GTR - Nice contrast Cons: - A little tacky - Looks like eve

Been getting a few hours in on this Stagea in between seeing family this holidays. The main focus for me has been welding up the rear quarters properly and making sure that the wheels have room to move under the widebody. If you've seen any widebody install then you'll be familiar with the process.

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

We've officially moved out of the fiberglassing and mould making stage of this project and on to final bodywork and primer. I spent this past week block sanding down all the fiberglass parts and prepping them for primer. I'll be doing all the priming in stages as my shop isn't big enough to do them

Quick little update while I finish up the next video. I really tried to build myself a buffer so I could do all this off camera and not have yet another mould making video but coupled with a trip to Japan and other things, that didn't end up happening. So continuing from the last episode / update. I

So I've actually been over in Japan for a little bit these past couple weeks hence the radio silence on here, some cool stuff I'll get into in a future post. But after I got back I immediately got stuck into this rear lip. So in the latest episode I showed making the prototype from the 3D printed mo

So before I drop the video either tonight or tomorrow, here is the latest update on the Stagea. In order to finish off the kit and have everything look like it works together, this car has been needing a rear lip / rear diffuser, whatever you want to call it. The main thing it needed was to bring th

I feel like at this point all of my posts just start by default with "sorry for taking so long" haha. I've been busy. I guess we'll start off just with all the photos of getting up to date with the Stagea, finishing off the widebody moulds and making and fitting the completed over fenders. I'm about

Been a busy couple of weeks working on both the Stagea and the Mx5. No updates for the Stagea yet but I have made good progress on the light pods from my last post. I got the mould finished up and sealed with polyurethane varnish and then coated in wax and PVA. As I mentioned in the last post, I rea

So a bit of a mixed update as I'm working on both of these builds simultaneously at the moment. Starting off with the Mx5. In the last post I had made the first of the two greebles for the front bumper. The second side followed the same process and I was able to finish it up pretty quick. My goal or

So once again, crazy amount of work the past couple weeks so forgive the delay, but catching up with last weeks episode, we got all the body filler sanded on the fenders down to 240 grit and then gave it a light coat of primer as an inspection pass. You'll see I also threw together the vents for the

Woah, two updates for 2 different builds in the same day. I'm a mad man. Anyway I wanted to drop this in here since I figured I might as well get you fully caught up on everything in the shop right now. So let's go back to the Stagea, we'd 3D printed 2 separate sets of over fenders for it only to le

HUGE update on the Mx5 in this post. This covers everything in the last episode as well as most of what's coming in the next episode. So the last time we touched the Mx5 I pulled off the original front end and mocked up the new Rx7 front that I'll be doing. It's finally time to get the custom fender

A little late on this update. I've really been putting in some hours so haven't had a chance to come through and edit up all the photos but I wanted to at least catch up with the Stagea. So for a quick recap of the latest episode, we finished off the split flange for the rear fender mould and then w

Following on from the last update, I finished the polishing on the plugs and added the flanges for mould making. Went around all the edges with filleting wax to round over any sharp corners or overhangs. After applying 5 layers each of TR-900 Mould Sealer and TR-910FD Mould Release Agent, the gelcoa

So this update is mostly to cover what happened in the latest video as well as the extra bits I've been able to finish in the couple days since then. There's also a couple behind the scenes updates on a past and future build and some changes to the plans here. Starting off with the Stagea, we finish

So a fair bit has happened the past couple weeks. I started off by printing a new front fender as well. I decided it was going to save me time with the filler if I had a better starting shape so here are the two side by side getting glued together. Now the only remaining printed parts from the first

So after a few more attempts and weeks of trial and error I reckon Stan and I have finally solved the issue with the 3D prints warping. Before I go into the real technical stuff, here are a few picture of the learning process starting with an attempt that was far worse than the originals: You can se

Hope everyone had a good x-mas and you're all enjoying the break. It's been pretty nice having a few days off but I'll be getting back to work on this Stagea soon. In the last episode I briefly went over the 3d printing and fitting the parts, and so I'll go over it all in a little more detail here.

So back to the Stagea finally. I was able to finish the upcoming video early so once that's finished rendering I'll upload it here but in the mean time, here are the photos I took along the way. Starting off with sealing and release agent-ing the moulds. Because the gelcoat and finish on the moulds

In the latest video I swapped out the original Miata front bumper and replaced it with one from an FD Rx7. The video itself was pretty self explanatory so there's not much for me to add with a post other than some fancy pictures and a little extra info on the swap. So basically for the past 4 years

So before I finish up on the Mx5 and get back into the Stagea, I wanted to make a pretty dramatic change to the rear end that's sort of in line with the direction I want to head with this build from now on. In the past 2 videos you would have seen me throw together some new wheels for the rear and m

Ok, so this is why there has been such a massive pause between episodes / uploads. Trying to get this effect to look good was absolutely punishing and probably a bit more than I should have attempted for my first crack at carbon layups but that's just who I am. So to throw it back to the first test

Man these past few weeks have been busy, It's taken me this long just to edit the photos to get these posts ready for you guys but here they finally are. So in the last update we were sort of around the stage in the video where I had the 3D models designed for these turbofans and the wheels were wel

Taking a break from the Stagea to make some small changes to the Mx5 the past couple weeks. I don't expect to have the video up this weekend because I'm not even half way through but will still show what I've been up to in this update. So something that I've been really hating about the Mx5 lately i

First off wanna start these things like I usually do, apologizing for not posting anything for like 2 weeks. I was putting in crazy hours the past few weeks to get the entire first side of the car moulded and haven't had the time to go through and edit all these photos as well. (over 1000 photos I h

Just a quick Patreon only update on what's been going on in the shop this week that wont be in the videos for a little while. I've finally got my 3D printer set up, it's a Elegoo Neptune 3 Max for anybody wondering. It's one of the largest home 3D printers you can get with a 420 x 420 x 500mm print

Sort of a shop update for what's been going on the past week. I'm working on the next video which I'll hopefully have up next weekend if everything goes to plan. My goal for the video is to make a start on the moulds. Started out this week by marking out where all the bolt holes were going to go on

So a little late with this post but I wanted to put up an extra post to go along with the last two videos that I've uploaded over on my YouTube channel. In Episode 18 of the Stagea build I got up to the first pass of primer to give me a good indicator of where I was at in terms of shaping the kit. T

The last few pieces of this kit have finally been finished off and so here is how the car sits now, ready for primer. Now that it's all back together and on the ground it looks absolutely menacing. I never could have anticipated that it would come out this well. I feel like you can really see my gro

So a little overdue for an update on this one since I've been really grinding the past few months trying to keep these videos in a regular upload order. So the last post on my this Stagea I showed running into those issues with the plaster and so having to start again with the filler. I did a fair b

Like I mentioned before, had to wait a few days for the paint on that light bar to dry to give it even a chance of not scratching all off as soon as I put the polycarbonate in. While I was doing that I moved back over to the roof and started sealing up all the louvers and then finishing off the insi

This is going to be a mega update since that tail light video took almost twice as long as it was supposed to. It feels like every time I build myself some buffer zone with my YouTube upload schedule, I end up throwing it all away on the next fun project. So in the last post I had the car out at Sum

Back in December I took the Mx5 to Mad Mike's Summer Bash down in Hampton Downs so figured I'd jump back in here and drop a small update and a bit of a photo dump. First off a quick couple photos showing how the car has been looking the past couple months. I haven't had much time to work on it with

So after I'd say only a week or so and most of that was head scratching, I had the shapes for the fenders sussed. One thing that I learned with the Mx5 and then again with the Mx5 again, and then again with this Stagea, is that expanding foam is not a very stable material. If you leave it for a coup

The tyres were rubbing like crazy but I did get some photos of it to show the fitment and why stock fenders aren't going to work. This shot really shows the difference in width. It was a little hard to visualize up till now. Also thought it was a good idea to show how much higher the GTR arch sits t

Then with the finished moulds I prepped them same as the plugs and began the layup for the sidskirts Then it was just the process of tidying up these sideskirts so that I can use them as the base for the next step of mould making. While that was going on I got tyres fitted to the new wheels and was

I want to thank the team at Driftworks again for helping me sort out wheels for this thing and getting them here pretty damn quick despite NZ Post's best efforts to lose them in transit. Finding wheels that worked perfectly for this build was a mission and took countless measurements of the fenders

So the issue we had was the front lip was sitting around an inch lower than the original Stagea front bumper and sideskirts. Obviously I want this conversion to look as clean as possible and so I had to find a way to extend the factory side skirts to match the new height. For the past few weeks I've

After giving the moulds a couple days to cure and the obligatory building up 8 layers of wax and a coat of PVA I got started on the first set of fenders. Standard recipe for these fenders. Gelcoat in the evening, followed by coupling coat in the morning; 1 layer 80gsm tissue and a layer 250gsm, then

There was still a little bit of work I had to do to the fenders to get them to 100% but once they were good I could start the moulds. Then the moulds were sprayed with a 2K epoxy sealer. I'm going to be making a lot of moulds over the next few months so it's probably wise for me to invest in a prope

It's been a while since my last update. Happily though there has been really good progress on this build and if you're keeping up with the videos I've been throwing onto YouTube then you'll be up to date. But here's the quick run down. So in the last update I was finishing up the shaping on the fend