Cyberpunk Mx5 - Designing new turbofans (Patreon)

Taking a break from the Stagea to make some small changes to the Mx5 the past couple weeks. I don't expect to have the video up this weekend because I'm not even half way through but will still show what I've been up to in this update.So something that I've been really hating about the Mx5 lately is the view from the rear. To me, even though the 15x10 wheels seemed massive at the time, the more I look at them the more I felt like they were too narrow to be as far apart as they work.

Proportions play a huge part of the design and these wheels were getting so unbearable for me that I ended up paying more than I have ever spent in one hit on this car to order a pair of new 295/35R15 Hoosier R7's and a matching pair of 13j wide wheels and I'll be remaking my rear wheels.

First step was to cut the centers out of my old wheels so I could re-use them with the new 13" wide barrels. Before doing this I was sure to record all of my offset and backspacing so I could make sure to keep my front lip spacing the same since I didn't want to make the car any wider, I just wanted to bring the inside of the wheel further in.

Cutting the centers out was pretty straightforward. Just had to grind out all my old welds and then press the centers out the same way as I pressed them in. 

With the centers out I hit the barrels with some etch primer and weld through primer and then pressed them in.

I really should have got more than 1 photo of the whole pressing them in process but it's the same as when I did it like 3 years ago to build the first ones:

Pressing in the centers is never the most precise thing, but the barrels themselves are only super cheap crappy speedway barrels so they're never going to be perfect anyway.

Still good to align them as best as possible with a runout gauge and a lot of back and forth.

Once they were as good as I could be bothered making them I welded them up. Again, this car is never going on the road, and probably wont even go on a racetrack again either, so there's no need to get these wheels perfectly straight.

After that they got etch primed and painted.

For anybody like me who likes to know full details, here's the 225/45R15 Proxes R888Rs that have been sitting stretched on a 10" wide wheel for 3 years, next to a new set of 295/35R15 Hoosiers. 

The 295 Hoosiers have a real life width of 305mm and the 225 R888Rs measure at 245mm but this was after years of being stretched. While I'm waiting for the paint on those wheels to bake I've been designing and testing around with the turbofan design. For the fans themselves I will be 3D printing the base shape and then skinning them in carbon for strength. 

I've spent the past couple days teaching myself how to use Fusion 360. There are similarities between it and Creo which is what I used to use, but it has been a little bit of a learning curve trying to overwrite my muscle memory.But after a day or two of struggling I'd come up with the design I want to make.

Going for a completely flat face on these rear fans to help differentiate them from the aerocovers on the front but also because doing them this way means I can just lay out a flat sheet of carbon and then after bonding the 3D printed fan to it I can trim it to a perfect circle. The center piece will be removable with a few bolts and this will let me take the cap off to unbolt the wheels from the car without having to take the entire covers off. I also added a small cutout for the valve stem this time because unlike my last wheels, these ones have the valves on the front (they didn't work on the front of my old wheels because of the offset and the wheel shape)

In addition to the turbofan design itself already being a bit cyberpunk, I had an idea for the past few months that I really wanted to test out for a "Glitch Carbon" look. I wanted to create a layup technique that looked like the carbon fiber was shattered or glitching and so I tested it out on some scraps and think it looks pretty interesting.

I'm not sure if it looks good or just messy but it's an interesting design that it sounds like a lot of other people have thought of but none of them tried it. I figured I might as well give it a go and so that's what I'll be doing for the front face of these turbo fans. I'll also be looking at using that vinyl cutter that I'm finally getting delivered to print of some custom transfers for it.I've also been making some more progress on 3D printing the Stagea body kit, I've only got a handful more parts to print off now so we should be on track for that to be finished when I get back to working on the Staega.But that's where we're at right now. I'll probably have another one of these updates out next week before the video goes up and should hopefully have the fans finished by then which I'm really excited for.