Made a quick stop at Tommy Riggins' shop on the way back home. Would have loved to have stayed longer, but another 10 minutes and I'd have been trapped in Jax for hours by traffic, so I cut and run. But he's going to come down to Daytona when we get all unpacked and help us assess what we have and what to do next.
Long story short, first order of business is to find the center line of the chassis and just start measuring everything and build a blueprint. Then we can start figuring out what needs to be made symmetrical and what doesn't.
But he made a few interesting points that I hadn't really considered. Like, the right front suspension has mounts further inboard than the left front, because oval track car. And I was all hung up on making them the same, which would require some mounts to be fabricated. And he was like "well maybe you have to do that, but the really important thing is getting both SAI's equidistant from the centerline. Then you work backwards from there. If you can do that, and you have the same steering curve on both sides, and similar enough camber curves, and the car feels the same in let and right hand turns, do you really care how you got there?"
So, yeah, there's going to be some fabrication wok involved, but I guess the first thing I need to do is to reorient my brain away from always working from a unibody where everything is a fixed point and you;re trying to create the best situation within highly limited conditions and just toward looking for those conditions knowing I can always create them from scratch if I need to.
As for body, Tommy certainly has some contacts, so he's keeping an eye out for Rad-era bodies, and I know some of you are butthurt over the sportsman bodies, and I do love me some Somerset, but I think I'm coming around to the car wearing "whatever works." Like, I kind of need to talk to Steve Stafford and say "Hey, we can do anything we want here, which off-the-rack option could possibly have an aero advantage?" So I totally get that there's more ways to solve this problem other than the ones I think are cool. I think Somersets are cool, but I also think going around racetracks fast is cool. And I also think saving money for badass Watts links and cams that sound like Hot For Teacher is cool. So I think the ultimate body question will be answered by a combination of availability, utility, cost and coolness, with all factors weighted fairly evenly.
