1978 Mini Clubman Estate, 8" drop, RWD, 20vt

Thanks for the kind words guys.

Rubicon, I camped just down from you a riv-run 2 or 3 years ago, I had the white Scirocco on red Porsche wheels, I believe me and a friend had a drunken chat with you about your pickup, and how awesome it was, looks like it's taking an interested new direction!

Just another teaser from the CAD stuff, I reaaalllllyyy want to get on with building the real thing, stupid life getting in the way:

It's all done on SolidWorks, I'm learning Catia at the moment, but I've got to far with the Mini in SolidWorks that it's not worth re-doing it in Catia now, the advantages aren't thhhaat big. That render was just done with the built in rendering package in SolidWorks, it's nothing special, hence the pixelation and jagged edges, but it gives you a bit of a better idea than just viewing the model.

i wish i could do cad like that
just starting to get into it heavily at uni, but we use siemens nx, can't stand it.

love the build by the way, combines 3 of my great loves, mini clubmans, boosted dubs and this stance.

Cheers. Yeah, I have found Catia a bit of a pain to be honest. Clearly designed by a team of full on geeks, and I've actually found it less capable than Solidworks in some ways. It was only a one semester module at uni, so I'm free of it as of Monday. I'm using SolidWorks COSMOS for my dissertation, so I'm back on that now.

I'm planning to teach my self surface modeling sometime soon too. Probably a mission for the Christmas holidays while I've got access to the mini to use the body as an example to practice modeling.

Glad the 5's going well. I kind of regret getting rid of it, but I couldn't have afforded to run it at uni, and it definitely would have distracted me from the mini once I've finished uni, so probably good I've not got it to play with in the long run!

Thanks chickenlegs! The knowledge is coming in bloody handy for this build, but I'm still not quite managing the grades I'm wanting at uni, boarder-line between a 1st and a 2,1 at the moment, which I know is nothing to complain about, but I was so determined I was going to get a 1st this year, because I know I could easily enough from a knowledge point of view, but I'm just not a very academic person.



Anyway, I thought I'd update this a bit with some progress, ok, it's not anything interesting to most of you, as I'm still 130 miles away from the car, and still a broke/busy student, but I've been re-designing the hubs and wishbones the last few days to try and get the centre of gravity down a bit, and get super easy adjustment between road and track settings.

So, these are the new plans... I think these are going to be testing my engineering skills a little come build time, but I think it'll be worth it, and it's not actually thaaattt bad to make, just need the joint seats machining up for me. (Unless I can get access to a decent lathe!)

This is the rear set-up, lower shock towers running the shocks off the lower wishbones to get the weight down low:



Looking a bit closer at the hubs, I'm planning to use a spherical joint in the upper wishbone, with a detachable mounting to bolt to the hub. The space that's currently a gap in the drawing is filled with various thickness shims, 5mm of thickness = ~3deg camber change. The idea of this is that I can just carry around a few sets of shims for various set-ups, allowing accurate adjustments to be made without having to get the tracking kit out. This way I can have different shims for long road journeys, with low camber so I don't eat the tyres too quickly, and it's not a handful to drive, then an agressive high camber set-up for track use. Plus if I get board at a show, I can whip out all the shims for ~7deg for a laugh and not loose all my settings ;D

Toe angle will be taken care of with a slightly eccentric bolt in the bushing at the front of the hub. The idea of using a bush at one end of the hub, and a solid spherical joint at the other, is that when the wheels are side loaded in cornering, the bush should deform slightly, giving a slight toe in to help stability, basically a very minor passive rear system. (MX-5's do the same thing using different stiffness bushes at the front and back of the rear hubs.)

The hubs are made from the center section of a mk2 golf hub (They seem to weld nicely, and will take decent enough CV joints, and 4x100 gives decent wheel and disc choice.) with folded/welded 3mm steel plate making up the new mounting points (with 15mm blocks where there's threads). They're probably hugely overbuilt, but they still come in a bit lighter than a stock golf hub thanks to being mostly hollow.




Then there's the front, I've not finished the plans on the computer yet, only in my head, but this is how far I've got so far:



Similar to the rear, the shock will come off the lower wishbone. The castor angle will be fixed, or adjusted slightly though shimming the whole wishbone back and forth on the inner bushes. Then the camber will be a similar arrangement to the rear, on the front this set-up also has the advantage that camber adjustments don't alter the king-pin inclination.

It's not shown here, but I actually plan to move the steering rack up to inline with the top wishbone, and then mount the steering arm off the block that the spherical joint bolts too, rather than directly to the hub, this way shimming the camber will leave the tracking un-touched, and being inline with a wishbone means potentially zero bump-steer.

This new set-up should allow changing between track and road settings to be a case of undoing 2 bolts on each hub, and slotting in a different shim. I can even make the front shims slightly wedge-shaped to adjust the toe angle slightly, so I can run a twitchier set-up on track than on road without ever needing to get the gauges out. Obviously I'll have to spend a while with the car on a set of gauges playing around with shims at first, but once a setting's been found once, I can go back to it quickly and easily with no special equipment, and no need for a perfectly level piece of ground.


Right, well now I've bored the curse word out of anyone not as geeky as me about these things, here's some pictures of the planned wheels, not very retro, but they're very light, and give amazing brake clearance:

Front, Compomotive CXR, 13x7, et0, running 175/50 13s:




Rear, Compomotive CXR, 13x9, et10, running 235/40 13s:




The rears will basically only be for show and track, because the cheapest I've found a 235/45 13 for so far is ~£106 each! so I'll be running 14x8s with 225/40 14's on them for road use, which come in at a pretty reasonable ~£60 each for Toyo T1-Rs.

So yeah, I really can't wait to finish uni and get on with this thing, but I expect I'll still playing with the plans a lot more in the near future.



Oh yeah, I nearly forgot, for anyone who's not seen the thread in the technical section, I've decided to take 40mm out of the roof to even out the proportions a little, and I've re-designed the cage a bit to allow the seat to lye back more for headroom (twice :, but more info on that'll wait until it's not silly-o-clock at night, because I need to sort my sleep-cycles out!



Oh yeah, another thing! A friend of mine's just finished building his Audi's engine to a similar spec to what I'll be aiming for, and it's been getting mapped this week. No final results so far, but the end result will be 280bhp, to keep the rods safe until he can replace the bottom end (this one's on ~210000 miles!), but this graph shows it on the rollers, producing a touch over 300bhp at 15psi, and check out that torque curve!! (the pink line):

this thread boggles the mind, I thought I was tech'y but when its starts getting into wire frame drawings and maths you know its a few cuts above "that'll do" engineering most of us have!

its a shame for me that you have altered your suspension design, as now I have nothing constructive to add lol . mounting coilovers to the top of the knuckle, on one side, in single sheer, was heading for a disaster.

great work, i'm looking forward to getting on with my spaceframed fiesta design but I want to finish the std shell race car first ;D

A couple of things i've noticed.
upper rear wishbones have a nasty kink, obviously this is to get around the coilover. having not read through the entitre thread, have you thought about pushrod suspension setup?
also, the lower rear wishbones look far too over engineered. again I can see that the coilover positioning is probably the reason for this. I've played with positioning coilovers around driveshafts on my semi-spaceframe I did at uni, not fun.

why are you running bushes and not bearings?

eeee reading all this makes me wanna go load the inventor up and get drawing ;D

Do you really need all that tyre at the rear ? I ran 175/50/13 with 350hp and had good traction on track tyres , there are some good bolt on hubs with abs in from ford and vauxhall 5stud , I wouldn't be confident in welding bits on to chopped up hub .

Anti dive stuff is a bit hard to quantify as it works by making the arms bind as they move which can't be a good thing . What I can say is you need some dive to load the front end up especially on track as you need to load the front end up to get some steering bite going into a bend .