Complete Build Thread, Daewoo Nubira

This story begins with a routine visit to my friends at Turbo Spark. First, I planned to build some air ducts that that I might improve the efficiency with which my pile cools its engine and sticks to the ground. Second, I intended to complete a previously done rust repair.

The air ducts would be my first experience with fiberglass and so, in preparation, I brought along everything I would need except a mold. A quick rummage through the garbage yielded a Styrofoam tray that, from the left over packaging, had once served to contain 532 grams of diced pork leg. Well pleased, I cut this in half and laid out the glass fibers. With a little help from my roll of transparent packing tape, these actually came out looking remarkably like air ducts.

Half of what used to be packaging for some pork I'd cooked a week before. You have to cover this stuff with tape or the resin will dissolve it.

Here you can see the glass sheet and the resin. Do not breath the fumes.

Applying more resin.

We ended up using three alternating layers of glass and resin. We left it overnight and were rewarded with a very strong, solid piece the next day.

Some quick notes on fiberglass. The resin is made from some of the nastiest stuff on earth. Do not let it touch your skin or anything else you are uncomfortable throwing away. It is noxious, seriously sticky, able to dissolve rubber (and skin) and perfectly happy to bond with your concrete driveway to such extents you will need a pick axe to remove it. The sheets of glass fiber are almost as nasty. Try not to touch them with your bare skin, wear long sleeves and do not breath the dust unless you're curious about how asbestos poisoning feels. In other words, use caution with this stuff.

But for all these problems, fiberglass is insanely easy to fabricate with. I'm going to make a new hood next time, after that some fenders and probably a trunk. Your own creativity is really the only limit when it comes to fiberglass shapes.

Now, the activity most likely to take over and ruin my life - rust repair. Before this weekend my Nubira had been the recipient of two new rear shock towers (both rusted through), two enormous patches on the drivers side sill, a new front fender and a section of trunk. Sunday, as I got the car up on a lift - thanks Turbo Spark for letting me use the shop - I discovered six new rust holes in the passenger side sill.

The enormous patches on the driver's side.

After a little finishing .

Surprise! More rust on the passenger's side.

I could have bought sheet metal and patched them at moderate expense a few weeks later but that is a fool's errand with one so skilled in ghetto fab as I. No, I would walk into the remains of a mostly demolished building next door, strip the steel from a large insulation panel and cut that up for strips. The only problem was that this insulation panel had been filled with plastic foam pellets, a million or so of which stuck to the metal.

You may call this a demolished building, I call it a shopping opportunity.

The prize!

I had planned to fix this with the help of a butane torch, but the shop owners were not as tolerant of noxious fumes as was I and compelled me to stop before salvaging the entire 3 meters of metal. This was a bummer in that I'd planned to make a front half flat bottom with the remainder, but not so bad in that I'd already burnt enough away to make my passenger's side patches.

Viola, rust patch for the passenger's side.

And the other one.

Given the absolute lack of investment and mostly salvaged materials, I think this is turning out pretty well. I cleaned out all the internal rust, made sure the frame rails are intact - they're fine - and reopened the clogged drain holes. The only remaining rust I know about is on a fender I plan to trash this weekend anyway. Some bondo and a fresh coat of paint and I'll bet nobody notices that 10% of my car is made from butchered thermal panels.

Look out JoeyM, this guy's making car parts with building demolition waste and pork packaging!

JoeyM was, to an enormous degree, my inspiration in this project - not to mention a whole lot better at it than me.

In other news, the front of my car is, well, not on the front of my car right now.

On the upside, this is the first time I've taken a chunk of my car apart and not found rust. On the downside, I did find crash damage. Redoing the oil cooler lines so they don't abraid. Got the rubber from a gardening supplies store and used it to both separate the two lines and protect anything they might rub on. More oil cooler routing stuff.

This is all in preparation for a tubular bumper and my aero optimized (non-rusty) replacement fenders.

And Mr. Kim (owner of the shop where I'm doing my work) is making noise about building the world's first long tube Daewoo header ...

GameboyRMH wrote: Look out JoeyM, this guy's making car parts with building demolition waste and pork packaging!

And those air ducts look really good

DaewooOfDeath wrote: JoeyM was, to an enormous degree, my inspiration in this project - not to mention a whole lot better at it than me.

Thanks, I'm flattered. I just want to point out that I was inspired by Andy Nelson. A few years back I was checking out the cars at the challenge and Andy told me about the washing-machine floor panels and transmission tunnel in his yellow volksrod.

Because Daewoos are pricesless.

Got the car down to two colors with the help of one of the kids, Choi Chan-shik who originally built the car. He's in high school now, so it was cool to see him again.

Fenders are for the weak.

Chan-sik strategically blocking the pornographic newspaper cartoon.

The brown fender and white fender are, here, united in a new black color scheme.

Combined with the painted rust patches and it almost looks respectable-ish in that "screw it it's a racecar" sort of way.

Car kinda looks like it's wearing a Batman mask now

Those headers look good. You can get a little more power and less underhood temp by wrapping them. If they're not on yet, be sure to shoot them with hi-temp paint first, I've seen a lot of people get away long-term with wrapping rusty headers and I'm doing it myself, but you know what they say about an ounce of prevention...

And get the volcanic or titanium wrap, it costs a bit more but just not having to deal with those awful loose glass fibers is worth it.

Yeah, it's getting a volcanic wrap before the piece goes on, with paint.

The bad part is that taking the manifold off let me see the ports. They, uh, aren't good.

I think I'm taking the entire car down to a local art college and telling them to do what they will. I'm going to have an "Evil and Poisonous Rubbish" logo, it's going to have something for my website and it's going to have a turbo spark thing, but past that I just want cool.

I just did a time trail event with the Spark Racing Team at the Korean F1 track and I've got some observations I think you guys might find useful.

1. The track is marvelous. Tons and tons of high speed corners, lots of tricky sequences, lots of runoff and beautiful facilities. I'm pretty much in love with the pits. It's nowhere near as much a horsepower track as I feared it would be. In my 140~ hp, 2500~ lb car, the peak speed was only 147 km/hr.

2. As predicted, the 2.0 motorswap has transformed my Nubira from by far the slowest car on the straights to still the slowest car on the straights but kind of sort of competitive. I think this might have something to do with the god-awful cylinder head exhaust ports dumping into the god-awful manifold that dumps into an exhaust pipe necking down from the stock (god-awful) 2.0L oem downpipe to the stock (and even more god-awful) 1.5L oem catalyst/muffler/tip. Nothing says racecar like a 1.5 inch pea-shooter.

I'm going to buy a cylinder head out of the junkyard this winter and port the living crap out of it. If nothing else, the completely functionless, blocked off from the factory nozzle things in the head that obstruct at least 25% of the port volume are getting cut off and welded shut. The car might even rev past 5800 rpm this way.

I think that will go nicely with the race header the Spark Racing shop is making me and the custom intake I'm making. 160-170 hp might not be out of the question. If I get that much, I'm only 20 hp down on the big boys in my preferred TT200 class. I don't think this will be a problem, for reasons I'll explain a little later.

1. This engine puked a quart of oil out of the breather during a 30 minute session - almost the exact same thing the 1.5L did. Nobody but me seemed very concerned about this. Do I just need to install a catch-can/accumulator and forget about it? I'm probably getting an accusump when I come back to the states this winter, so I think that should cover my oiling needs.

2. I think my cooling mods are working. The car actually barely got up to temperature even while I was beating the living crap out of it for half an hour straight. Granted it was cold (45 degrees) outside, but still. I actually might need to block off some of the oil cooler for the winter because the car doesn't achieve normal temperatures, like ever, when I'm just putzing in cold weather.

3. I may need a brake upgrade. The slotted stockers were getting pretty smelly and turned blue. I have to check, but it looks like the 278 mm (vs 256 mm) rotors and associated calipers off a Chevrolet/Daewoo/Holden Epica will bolt on to my stock uprights. I might just grab the entire upright and, in doing so, replace the stupid wheel bolts with studs that render mounting the wheels much less of a pain in the ass.

4. I think I'm on to something with my suspension setup. My car is very sensitive to weight distribution and ride height changes, but with a .75 inch drop in front, a 1 inch drop in the rear, 9kg springs all around and no sway bars, this is one ridiculously sweet handing econobox. Basically suspension tuning in which I control roll stiffness by adjusting the roll centers. By keeping the car relatively high (and by lucking into some unusually factory geometry) I've been able to maintain good camber curves, high roll centers and close roll couples. While the car does roll a little bit (2.7 degrees total roll), it's not nearly as much as you'd expect and the transitions are very, very crisp.

The car is so adjustable, so neutral, so easy to toss around and it has just stupid cornering speeds. This is three track events now on this basic setup and in all three I basically corner as fast as comparable cars on whatever the next level of tire is. I have summer tires and my cornering speeds are about the same as guys on r-compounds (I actually reeled a few of them in during the twisty parts of the track). When I had crappy all seasons, my cornering speeds were right around what competitors with summer tires had. Nobody on street tires was even close. Not the BMWs, not the Genesis Coupes, not the Tiburons or Tuscanis, nothing.

More things I love about this setup include the ridiculously lite overall tire wear, the way I can run very little camber (about -1.5) without beating up the outside edges of the front tires and the fact that, in spite of being a FWD sedan with a 63% front weight bias, it wears the rear tires almost as much as the fronts.

I will never go back to slamming cars and putting on big swaybars. This works just so, so much better. I might need to bump up to 12 kg springs when I make the jump to r-comps, but the current setup is just wonderful. I really, really recommend trying it yourself.

1. A quart is A LOT, that amount would overwhelm most catch can setups that don't have a drain back to the oil pan. You should get a catch can but not to fix this problem. To fix this problem, you should look into modifying the valve cover with a baffle to keep oil from flooding into the PCV / breather lines, or attaching an aftermarket baffle box near their fittings if that's not doable. Only oil fumes should be sucked through those lines, actual liquid oil going through is not good.

2. So you don't have a thermostat anywhere in the oil cooler system? You could block off some of the oil cooler as a quick fix but it would be best to add a thermostat somewhere (thermostatic sandwich plates are the easiest, then there are H-shaped units used for motorcycles that won't make a rat's nest of oil lines in your engine bay). Without a thermostat you'll always be fighting overcooling problems.

3. Sounds like a good upgrade but if you turned your rotors blue you might want to consider a brake vent system as well, just bigger rotors won't fix a heat problem that big. I am currently conducting bleeding edge research on the subject of applying cheap bastardry to this problem and have some ideas if you're interested.

4. Your unusually good factory geometry is what's doing it, on most macstrut cars the stock geometry is crap and gets rapidly crappier with decreases in ride height. In your case the good geometry was just waiting for you and you didn't have to spend tons on obscure/custom parts to fix the geometry. Lots of performance was just waiting to be unlocked by harder springs.

1. Yeah, I'm getting the feeling that this series of Holden-made Dtech's are pretty bad about shoving all their oil into the valve covers in sustained, hard use. The 1.5 did it, too. I want to buy a spare head this winter so I can take my time making the ports nice and matching it with a custom intake I'm also going to build. Might as well port the drain back holes and build a baffle while I'm at it. That said, if I have a drain back in the catch can, is it necessarily a problem if it's puking through the PCV?

2. I thought my sandwich adapter was supposed to have a thermostat integrated inside. I evidently thought wrong! Gonna grab a thermostat when I come back to the US the Christmas.

3. I'm very interested. Also, my foglights are not long for this world.

4. It's definitely a part of my cornering speeds. That said, I don't think it would be too hard for most strut cars to duplicate what I have with some RCAs. If you want some considerably more knowledgeable insights onto why the no bars, high roll centers setup works so well, I can provide a very detailed write up from a guy considerably better at this stuff than me. I've basically stolen the setup off this car and, with a few tweaks, turned it backwards for use on the Woo.

1. Improving drainback from the head is a great idea as well, it may even help more than internal baffling. A catch can with a drain to the oil pan will keep the oil from getting into the intake and keep your oil level from dropping too much, but that's sort of a hackish fix...you should really do whatever you can to keep liquid oil from getting into the PCV and breather system in the first place. A good working dump-type catch can setup will also help to keep your oil cleaner since the oil fumes also contain traces of gasoline fumes and water vapor that you ideally don't want to put back into your oil.

2. My biggest money-saving idea is the use of minimal lengths of that expensive hi-temp hose, then switching to something cheaper like dryer ducting or "barber shop" hose. Maybe 1ft from each wheel. Also you can probably get the backing plate vent ports fabbed cheaper than buying them, I know I could. Turning your foglights into brake vent inlets is a great idea. And I now present a clever innovation for the first time - the use of manually adjustable butterfly valves on the brake vent lines. These let you fine-tune the amount of airflow to keep your brakes in the optimal range (although you probably need them WFO from the sounds of it), and you can close them on the street to prevent overcooling.

3. I could definitely use some RCAs myself but those available for my car are way too expensive...I'm saving up for custom uprights. It might cost less to do all four wheels than to buy RCAs for the front too. Gonna get them designed in CAD, then either get them CNC'd or 3D print a model to make a mold from.

How tough is it to do CAD modeling? I'd really like to try my hand at it one of these days.

That and I'm really digging the idea of using the latest technology to marginally improve the handling of, respectively, a 21 year old Toyota and a 15 year old Daewoo.

Your valve idea is cool but, yeah, I suspect wide open might be the only valve setting I need. The car is about 1 year from being a full time, completely committed racecar.

For me CAD modeling is really really hard because I don't know how to do it at all yet But I gotta try to learn...here's a relevant thread on the subject:

http://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/off-topic-discussion/anyone-taught-themselves-cad/71726/page1/

Behold! I have collected my racing videos for your perusal. http://bengarrido.com/2014/01/06/racing-videos/

I must admit I was quite taken by this thread. I have seen the Daewoo in my area, but never gave them much of a thought. After going through your thread I am very impressed. The ingenuity shown and the fact you have been able to teach the kids at the same time is definitely impressive. Great thread. I can't wait to see some new video of the car with the 2.0 litre engine. In reply to DaewooOfDeath:

I hope there's many more videos coming next year. I'm gonna try and run a full season.

One thing this car has taught me is that, with a little creativity, almost anything works as a platform.

She's very likely dead ...

Oh no what happened?

Nooooooooooo..........

There was a concrete abutment roughly the same height as my rear suspension's chassis mounting points. My girlfriend was reversing and accidentally hit the gas pedal instead of the brakes. It was about a 5 mph impact, but born almost entirely on the suspension pickup points. The underside of the car is all kinds of bent.

Kinda bummed out today.

I signed the papers to officially take it off the road.

Dang. Sorry to hear about the incident. Is there no way to salvage the rear suspension??

I would have to buy an entire new rear subframe, straighten everything it's attached to and replace most of the rear suspension links. Probably not worth it for a $900 car with creeping transmission problems, rust issues and massive oil control shortcomings.

Honestly, I got three years of track days out of a 98 Nubira that I built with a bunch of middle school kids. I think that's a win on balance.

I'm just going to take what I've learned with this project (ie, tons) and apply it to the next rig. Stay tuned for the Complete Build Thread - Tiburon/Tuscani/Elantra/Accent coming soon.