Ago's scratchbuilt GT40 Mk I

[Neil]

Regarding your mention that the thicker steel was hard to form-

It is helpful to have the laser cut short interrupted straight lines where you plan to make a bend. (they will look like a series of dashes) These make bending on that line far easier and when the upright is assembled, simply fill the "dashes" with weld beads.

 

[Agostino]

Thanks Neil, good point! To form thicker steel I'm used to thin the metal on the inner side along the folding lines with a grinder and then I do a weld reinforcement after folding, but your method is definitely much faster. I still have a lot to learn...

 

[Mike Taylor]

Incredible. Simply incredible

 

[David mono]

Agostino have a look at tricktools.com , metalmeet.com and chuckcobra.com . Chuck has some free PDF downloads you may find useful .

 

[Agostino]

Very interesting sites, thanks! The only regret is that by roaming through the Cobra site and the many projects there, it is clear that life is way too short...

 

[David mono]

Chucks bracket bending brake looks like a good project. I haven't made one yet but it looks durable and not very expensive for materials.

 

[Agostino]

Construction is progressing slowly, the rear part of the chassis is almost finished as well as the rear suspensions. Wishbones and links should be close to the original design, while I'm using my own steel uprights to take Audi hubs and bearings (in the meantime I managed to get a quite decent Audi 01E gearbox). I also put some zinc-phosphate weld-thru primer to protect the chassis from surface rust. The quite long lock down period was a good opportunity to dedicate some weekends to the make over of my home garage, so I cleaned the shelves and took some pictures of the bits I'm collecting for the car. This kind of projects last so long that you can completely forget what you already bought and where you are storing them!

 

[Ryan L]

Great job on the floor

 

[Ryan L]

Handbrake Grip

Handbrake Grip

jbanglia105eparts.co.uk

I have just ordered some, will let you know how i go.

 

[Shaun]

Would love to know how the grip looks and fits I hate the one I have in mine just looks cheap and chunky

 

[Agostino]

Hi Ryan, thank you for the link, actually I bought it some years ago, I just controlled and the seller is the same, even if at that time he was offering it on ebay. I have never tried to fit it, I'm waiting to black paint the handbrake before, however it looks good and definitely a much softer rubber compared to the vintage one placed on the original handbrake, but it may be just the aging of the rubber that made it looking like hard plastic. Just to give you an idea my cat found the new one on a table and played with it for few minutes before I discovered, now there are a few bites on it.

 

[Ryan L]

Good to know. I will try and keep it away from our cat

 

[kyler]

I live in Milan, let me know when you are in Italy, it would be a pleasure to meet you.
About the 3D model, I don't own all the drawings.
For my workflow I started in 2015 to plan the 3D model basically relying on the several pictures available mainly on this forum and in general on internet and taking advantage of the huge capability offered by CAD software.
Main issue in this modeling was to get an absolute reference for the dimensions.
In 2017, after some design iterations, I was quite happy with the results but not sure about the correct measurements, so I planned to buy the body shell before starting the chassis fabrication to finalize the model.
However at that time I saw an offer on eBay of a set of original drawings (I discovered recently a dedicated discussion on this forum on this drawings that however I have missed when it was active) and I decided to bought it (it was much cheaper than buying a body shell and it served better to my purpose).
This set of drawings is quite limited, it is about 10% of the total number, but it was very helpful to me for two reasons: 1) to set the correct overal measurements and to discover that my original model based on chassis pictures had an error lower than one inch 2) to discover the huge amount of fine details in the original drawings that cannot be catch from the pictures.
This is why at the beginning of my buildlog I defined my project just as "inspied" to the original one, because in my opinion a true copy needs to be based on all drawings to reproduce all the fine details.

I live in Milan, let me know when you are in Italy, it would be a pleasure to meet you.
About the 3D model, I don't own all the drawings.
For my workflow I started in 2015 to plan the 3D model basically relying on the several pictures available mainly on this forum and in general on internet and taking advantage of the huge capability offered by CAD software.
Main issue in this modeling was to get an absolute reference for the dimensions.
In 2017, after some design iterations, I was quite happy with the results but not sure about the correct measurements, so I planned to buy the body shell before starting the chassis fabrication to finalize the model.
However at that time I saw an offer on eBay of a set of original drawings (I discovered recently a dedicated discussion on this forum on this drawings that however I have missed when it was active) and I decided to bought it (it was much cheaper than buying a body shell and it served better to my purpose).
This set of drawings is quite limited, it is about 10% of the total number, but it was very helpful to me for two reasons: 1) to set the correct overal measurements and to discover that my original model based on chassis pictures had an error lower than one inch 2) to discover the huge amount of fine details in the original drawings that cannot be catch from the pictures.
This is why at the beginning of my buildlog I defined my project just as "inspied" to the original one, because in my opinion a true copy needs to be based on all drawings to reproduce all the fine details.

Are you selling copies of the plans you have dude ?

 

[Neil]

"Dude"?

 

[kyler]

sorry friend, was a slip of the tongue

 

[Agostino]

Sorry Kyler, they are not for sale. Moreover my drawings are customized to suite my fabricatin workflow and tools, probably not very useful and quite a messy for everyone but me.

If you want there is an old thread by another user,

ReCreated FAV Prints

I just recently purchased a set of the original FAV Chassis blueprints. I Find the secrecy surround the Original FAV prints frustrating, so I want to begin recreating each print in modern cad format and publishing that information for free. There is no catch, my hope is that once this...

www.gt40s.com

where in post#9 you can find a link to a grabcad repository where the original set of drawing that were available on eBay sometime ago are available.
As I mentioned in my buildlog these drawings are a good value for refining your plans, but the hard part of the work for the steel monocoque comes later, so make sure to consider the time and efforts you want to dedicate to the project.

 

[kyler]

good afternoon Agostino
wow thank you so much, that's very very helpful
the reason I asked was im searching high and low for detailed drawings of the horseshoe and brace
which I wanted to know how to fabricate.
im now also thinking of doing my build in aluminium so detail is everything for strength
but I am very grateful to you for getting back to me
thank you so much
best regards
kyler

 

[Ryan L]

Kyler.
Probably best to start another thread rather than clog Agostino's build thread. Discussions regarding details of a Monocoque will rarely result in a concise conclusion in a succinct time. I was going to respond with some more details for you but this is not the place.

Ryan

 

[Agostino]

Quite a long time from the last update... still mainly working on the chassis but I dedicated some time to finalize some other bits. The first one is the gear shift, the more complex parts were fabricated with a 5-axis CNC, not casting as for the originals. The shift knob comes from ebay, I don't know who made it but it does his duty well.

 

[Agostino]

The 302 short block is now a long block, next step is to source the intake manifold for the quad webers.
I also spent a lot of time looking around for the original air vents but they are really rare, so I opted for 3D printing the internal parts and to mount them into Capri's air vent houses.