200$?!?! Alright, I'm coming over... The Crinkles story

Thnaks for the kind words, y'all. 

I did get the other side done for the most part this past weekend...

But then my brother came over and we got into... this!

So the hood is too narrow and needs to be widened, because of all that weird lumpy stuff in the middle, I insisted we cut it twice on the flat spots. 

 Then we got some wood chunks together and mocked up the new width.

But this opened up a whole new can of worms. The car currently has some 245 width (very old) race tires on some not-too light (but wide) 15s. 

I was planning on switching over to the 13lb, but much narrower 15s that I repaired previously. 

Because of the wheel offset as well, there is a huge difference to the over all track width of the car between these two choices. And because of that difference, we can't start making any fiberglass parts until we decide between the two.

SO, I need you! dear forum reader to help me out. Choose between:

15x6.5 wheels weighing in at 29.5 lbs(with tire) ( 205/50/15s to be added later) ...

This will keep us in the narrow tire category at the 2024 GRM challenge.

OR: 15x8 wheels with 245/40/15 weighing in at 40.5 lbs... this will put us in the wide tire category at the GRM challange. Keep in mind, I don't have 4 matching rims, 2 sets will be color matched to attempt to fool the eye...

Here are the other 2 wheels.

So help me out! Is the extra tire width worth the weight and cosmetics penalty?!?!? 

I'm sure someone with more expertise will chime in eventually but on a car that's only 1800 lbs (?), wide tires can be a liability because it can't create enough friction to get heat into them. I only remember this because I used to have a FFR Challenge Series car and there was much discussion about the trade-offs of going to a wider tire and that car was about 2400 lbs.

245s on an 8 inch wheel is not ideal imho.

Can you run 205s on the 8s and get down to a decent weight?

Not sure how much weight difference there will be on the narrower tires? But Running 225s (max allowed by Narrow tire class) on the wider rims has now entered the chat... 

If you want to stay in narrow tire class, I would run 225 on the 15x8. FWIW, it's just autocross, so if your goal is absolute best possible time then fitting as much tire as possible on the 15x8s would likely be faster. I won in 2019 with 245/40 Hoosiers on 15x8s on a 2500lb car. Depends on the tire too. The Hoosier A7s mega stiff sidewall are quite resilient to pinch. But a 200tw may be too sloppy to be worth the width. 

I'd build it for the tires you want vs what you think will perform best - neither set is ideal but that's a lot of work to do anything but build it for the potential life beyond the challenge.   Besides, maybe you come across that ideal set - wide and lighter. 
 

just my $.02

I misspoke earlier, the wide wheels I have are 15x9, needed to be that size for nearly free 245 width tires I got. 

But,

I think Jfryjfry hit the nail on the head. Post challenge, new wheels and tires will certainly be fitted when more than 100$ can be spent on them. Speaking of which... anyone driving past Bridgeport and down the coast this weekend? 

Been a bit since I posted but work has been getting done. The other day when my brother came by, he had the audacity to suggest that I should cut the doors lower as opposed to making the body line higher. How dare he come in to my garage and be so right. 

Well I cut the top off of the, "B-pillers" and installed new lower profile tops. 

This of course means the doors are too tall now, so chop chop. 

Now I was having a hard time getting the doors bent down to the right shape, so I made some door bender pliers. 

All bent down to a reasonable shape now, but, a pretty ugly hole left on top of the door. More filing cabinet metal to the rescue. 

I moved on to the other side for some reason but, you know, I did both sides. 

Cut, bent, and a slight stretch to mimic the curve of the door. Then I made up another small section for the front and tacked it all together. 

back to finish side one. 

And, with both sides done, I had to roll it outside for some fresh air while the wife's car got new brakes. 

Things are beginning to approximate a car! 

Forgive my bluntness...  it looks like the body should be moved forward 3 or so inches....  

seems like the rear wheel well is too far back.  Moving the saab body forward would center the rear wheel and possibly bring the body right up to the door.  
but maybe I'm missing something??

In reply to jfryjfry :

I don't know-thinking that'll look great with a little Monza Can-Am box flare styling going on! I'm seeing that quarter panel cut at the shoulder , moved outward with a horizontal piece of fiberglass to make up the spacing! He could then make a wheel arch based off of the wheel/tire combo. A long piece of wood with one end attached to the hub, the other to a pencil and a wheel jacked up to static ride height! Presto-perfect arch!

Big box flares will be a great opportunity to center the fender around the wheel. I love the door mods to match the Saab body, nicely done. Also is that a 1st gen Cummins I spy? Love those trucks!

Yes, big box flares are certainly in this car's future. And going back to the original question. The reason why the arches look so out of center is because they have already been butchered.  Someone has already tried to use this body for similar purposes (presumably) and cut out huge sections of all 4 fenders. Although I'm not sure what they had planned since all 4 were moved backwards? Were they going to put it on a vw bug and just leave 4 feet of front overhang? 

You can see how the fronts are cut here as well. 

And that's a big check on the first gen Cummins diesel in the background. That's been our side project and we just realized that a minor leak in the injection pump could be fixed simply by doubling the horsepower. 

This will be awesome!

So we are now several months (I guess) into the conversion and we had a a realization. The rear of this shell is a Sonett II and the front is a sonett I !

The main difference is that the Sonett I had a big bubble window in the back, and I'm glad to not have that as it would be hard to replace with lexan. 

Sonett 1 below for reference;

And the main difference for the front is that we have the very pointy, I'm gonna call it a "muppet nose, of the Sonett I, while the Sonett II has a flatter front and pop up lights. 

Sonett II below for reference; 

Now, this past weekend we were discussing the duck-bill lip spoiler we would add the front in order to make it look less like kermit the frog and I had what is either the best or worst idea I could have...

My idea is, that since the front is a little bit too long anyway, we would cut the nose off right in line with the turn signal lights. 

This would leave a big opening up front for air, shorten the nose and hopefully make the car look less like an unhappy sesame street character. 

Obviously, I would need to do a lot of fiberglass work to fix this but the goal would be to make it look more like a modern Miata with it's big open mouth.

Hastely drawn proposed cut lines shown below. 

Fellas, please Talk me out-of/ in-to this terrible/awesome idea! 

In reply to More Tools Than Sense :

IF done correctly, it might look ok, 

But if done poorly, it will look terrible.  I know I don't have the skills to do it right.  Do you?

I propose leaving it long and making headlight covers to make it less muppet and more Porsche 904.

I think if you cut that nose with a Datsun 240z style rake to the shape (and close the ends up), it'll look pretty good.

I'd say you have a huge project ahead of you without adding a not-small job that is purely optional at this point.   
 

get the car running and sorted and then decide if you want to spend a few weeks/months doing body resculpting!

You could do worse than to make the nose look something like this

It looks like an extended Europa nose to me....

All good points so far, A much smaller opening 'ala Ferrari Dino would be much easier... 

Well, I picked up nearly $300 worth of paint and resin for $80 this morning so I think I'll get the hood back together and make the rear box flares before I decide weather or not to get extra choppy. 

Well, we have done some work with the fiberglass but I'll get back to that. On the weekdays I've been working on filling this rather large gap in the trunk area. 

We want to keep the body removable, so the plan is to build the sheet metal out close to the fiberglass body and then fill the gap with a rubber seal. 

I decided to start with the wheel arches. 

I bent some filing cabinet into an L shape and started running it through the stretcher. 

Now where do I find cheap/ free rubber seals? How about from this 25 year old VW that is headed to the scrap yard?

The below picture shows the trunk seals, but the door seals are where it's at, they have the seals next to the mounting clips instead of on top of them.

First section done, then welded up as well. Seems to work like a charm.

I gave the same treatment to the driver's side then started in on the rear. 

I'm going to possibly need a way to hold the body against the seals, but honestly, it's kind of a snug fit already.

If it needs the extra hold, plans include, bolting some metal tube similar to an exhaust hanger onto the body

and then using giant "rubber bands" cut from coolant hoses to pin things in place. 

I should be able to finish this up over the long weekend and then see whether it needs any extra help. 

Got the rear trunk pan finished up. Couldn't talk my brother into coming over to do more fiberglass work but hopefully we can get back on that this coming weekend. 

Picture dump below.

Pretty happy with how this all turned out. Should make a nice seal around around the edges. I'll just need to add some grommets to cover those bolt access holes.

I also just found some 1.5" roll-bar tubing nearby for $5 a foot so in the time between fiberglass work, I guess I know what I'll be doing. 

With all the sense you clearly have, you must have a berkeley ton of tools. 

Love every single bit of this.

I love SAABs, love this build, great skills!