Chimera Progress Update (Patreon)

Quick update on the Mx5 and the progress on the front end.

Fenders are coming along great and they are really doing a good job at adding that circular detail from the rear fender into the front to tie them together. I'm liking things a lot better now.

In other news the replacement fuel pump arrived and so I got that swapped over. Despite the manufacturer saying it would be a direct replacement, the angle and orientation of the fuel strainer was completely opposite to how it was supposed to be so I've ordered a replacement filter from Germany that I'll swap over later, but for now the engine is running again.

With just the pump swapped over the car fired right up, and even though the battery was completely dead, just having it idling in the garage for a few minutes gave it enough juice from the alternator that I don't even need to jump start it so it's good to see that that still works as well.I still need to pull the battery out of the boot and mount it behind the driver, that's next on my list.

Once I had the fenders removed and all the tape cleaned up I added the hardware and fitted them in place. I also played around with some extra pieces for the front. I added some universal vents that I made to the bonnet, installed a little indicator blanking plate on the drivers side that I made a few years ago, and toyed with the idea of a vent / slits in the bumper.

Also this whole time the headlight covers have just been sitting in place with tape which meant going to pick them up from somewhere on the lawn whenever there was a strong breeze. I finally got them mounted along with the original LED headlights from the Mx5 front end. Kept that iconic sleepy eyes look but I'm thinking I might angle the headlights to make them more 'angry eyes'.

Last but not least I added the original oil cooler and the external pipes as that nod to the Bosozoku tuning culture that I had on the original version of this car.

Since this car has a much bigger central vent than the previous versions I wanted to break up some of that empty space and I thought the cooler would be a good addition. Here it is on the original car back when I finished the first version:

And I really like that throwback to the original version of the car. Another thing I've been thinking during this rebuild is that I'll probably not be putting the super fancy carbon fiber lightbar back on. It was an awesome experiment but it just seemed way too over engineered for a build like this. I want to stick to the core of this build which is cyberpunk. And breaking that down to Cyber and Punk. I can get the cyber with some sci-fi additions and fake hardware and styling, but punk to me means scratch built with junkyard parts, not super fancy vacuum bagged carbon fiber.So I'm probably going to have a go at fitting that same light bar from the earlier version or maybe buy a new longer light bar and just mount it to the bonnet or front bumper like this

Also kind of inspired by the lightbars on Porsche rally cars.

The design I made on the most recent light bar was similarly inspired by rally light bars but mostly the ones on modern Ford WRC cars

It looks sick as hell on these actual rally cars, but I don't know, I feel like my proportions were all off, it just never really hit right for me.

So for now I'll be leaving the light bar off and just thinking about it. Might try the old V1 light bar before I buy something else. The only thing that might get in the way of the V1 lightbar is that I'm thinking of putting an extra piece in the front grill on the opposing side to sort of close it off, this is a really quick mock up I did which doesn't look too great because of the lighter colour on the black bumper, but i think if these were all colour matched then it would look interesting enough.

This idea was inspired by my Suzuki Twin that I've been driving in Japan as it has an asymmetric grill and I really like that look, but even before that I saw some grills like this on old Fairlady Z race cars and they always stood out to me.

To get a little bit into the weeds with this, I think the reason I'm drawing so much design inspiration from this older era is that this sort of retro futurism wave from the 80's / 90's (ignore these cars being from the 60's) was when a lot of iconic cyberpunk work was created, and so they all have that "future as imagined by the 1980s" look to them. In that way keeping a lot of these little quirks from cars / racers of this era is gonna be a goal of mine with this build.

There's been a lot of writing in this update because so much of what I'm doing lately is just figuring out how I want to do this build and what it needs and I don't ever get to explain anything in the videos.From your suggestions I think I've figured out what I'm going to be doing with the paint job and it's definitely going to lean more into that 'punk' element. I'm going to keep most of the front bumper fluoro yellow as that's super iconic for the build, but for the doors I'm going to be spraying over the stencils that are on there and then peeling them back to reveal the yellow details from underneath. I'm going to try a deliberately messy paint job to give the car a sort of graffiti feel. Which is probably going to be incredibly difficult for me.I'm also likely going to be including some tags or sticker bombing on the car again as before. One of my all time favorite artists for cyberpunk designs has to be Fernando Correa who has an Instagram @fc_arts_.

His work is so perfectly in the direction that I'm trying to go with this build, it should give a great idea of how I hope to wrap this build up.

This isn't the first time I've talked about Fernando, I absolutely love the dude. But that should give a really good idea of where I'm heading with this build. That's pretty much all I've got to share. Next up for the actual build is to relocate that battery and then get started on the sideskirts which the car has been needing for years.