4G63 Locost

The Locost was sold in December 2006, and moved to Miami, FL. If you happen to come across it, feel free to tell it I said hello. Apparently it's already been sighted at a couple of autocrosses, and is reasonably quick.

 This is the build of a mid-engined "locost" type car, powered by a Mitsubishi 4G63 turbo powerplant. This vehicle was designed and built from scratch for the total cost of $1,939.99 to compete in the for-exhibition "locost" class of the Grassroots Motorsports $2005 Challenge. 

This is a vehicle which will be registered and legally street driven. In its' current trim, obviously, it is not legal to be driven on the street. I will be tinkering and re-working a number of items on the car during the coming months as I consider preparation for both registering the vehicle and competing in the $2006 Challenge. (Update as of Feb. 2006: I'm quite sure that the locost will not be making the $2006 challenge, as I'm more keen on competing with the "SuperSprite", though I am still intent on getting this street legal) 

When browsing through the site, keep in mind that this is not a professionally built car, and there weren’t a group of seasoned mechanical engineers around to inspect it. I'm a 19 Year-old (or was when I built it) with limited tools and experience who had never designed and built a car before.

This website is currently under construction, but I will be updating it as much as I can in my spare time. Thus far I have put up the pre-build summary, the build story, the complete budget for the car, and the recap of what happened with the Locost at the challenge. Items I hope to have up in the future include a chart of full specifications and dimensions, etc. Something a few people have asked me about is the possibility of uploading some drawings or CAD files for the chassis, the reason for my not providing something like this is purely due to worries regarding safety and liability issues, and I decided it simply wasn't worth the risk. 

        -Kent Finnerty

(kentfinnerty@gmail.com)   

I could probably go on all day about what I had to do for each step of the construction, but I think that I'll have to come back and add text over a period of time, when I can sit and type for an hour or so. For now, I'll just post some photos, as that's what most people are here for anyways.

Here it is, May 26, 2004. A steel delivery today means that it's time to start cutting and welding a chassis.

Just progress. I should note that the building of the chassis must be done with extreme precision in terms of the cutting (length), fitting (at the proper angle), and welding (to keep warping and distortion to an absolute minimum).

Exit the Build table, as the chassis center section was strong enough at this point to be moved about. I didn't have room to keep the table, so it was scrapped, what a waste. Note the pair of Corbeaus, these are the $0 selldown ones that were from the 1991 Talon AWD. The photos don't show it, but they are more than a little beat when you see them up close, but hey, what should I expect for free?  

Here is the rear suspension/engine section. As you can see, when I began the build, there was no room in the garage, as that place was occupied by a '66 Mustang (G.T. 350 Clone). During Locost construction, that mustang was sold, and I was able to move into the garage. However, since I thought that I wouldn't have the garage space to work with; I designed and built the car in a modular fashion so that I could build it more easily with the cramped space that was available. Anyhow, I thought I would just explain this in case there are some furrowed brows at this point. The plan was to keep three separate parts of the car (front, mid, and rear sections) until they would eventually unite to form one amazing car, which would then grow ever-powerful, gaining the human ability to think and reason, at which point it would have to be destroyed, but it would be too late as the car would have already invaded Poland.

Like I said, I wanted to use absolutely every part that I could from the laser since it was all $0. This is the under-dash plastic, which I test-fit, just to see how/if it might fit:

Here is the stock pedal box. Again, I was able to use this, but had to drastically shorten the length of the pedals in order for them to work:

Getting a start on the front section of the car:

I thought it might be nice to get out of the weather a little bit, and enjoy a good sit down. The problem was that I still wanted to work on the car. Well, I thought I might as well bring the car inside with me (on the coffee table) while I could have a good sit on the couch. I thought about how to solve a problem with the front suspension. By the way, those remote reservoir coil-overs are from a Honda F4i motorcycle. They ran about $20 each including shipping on eBay. I was just playing around with them in this instance, as I ended up using them for the rear instead, due to their higher spring rate.

 I think it's important that I mention just how much time was spent on re-engineering, completely altering, or simply standing around head scratching on this project. You might look at these photos and think, "How did this thing take ten months to build, it looks so straightforward". Looking at these photos, I think the same, but it was all those little things and problems that had to be solved, one after the other that just ate up hundreds of hours thinking. Once you figure out what to do, it's dead simple, and work gets done at a rapid pace, but all my snags made this project drag on and on. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to make this sound difficult or convince anyone not to take on a project like this. It's not terribly difficult, it's even a relatively straightforward process, just be eager to take on all the problems that come up during the build (or put the car on your coffee table while you sit on the couch and tinker with various ways to solve a problem).

What you are looking at here is a 1" thick piece of scrap bar that I got for free, which was taper-bored to fit the upper ball joints that I had. The ball joints were actually some type of universally-used racing ones, which were popular for dirt track and NASCAR-type cars (I think). Anyways, after I found out some info, and made some phone calls, I determined the taper of the joints, and was able to get a tapered reamer, which would drill a hole that would match the taper of the ball joints I had. Anyways, like most everything that people build for the challenge, these ball joints were way more trouble than they were worth, but I used them because I had them and they cost me next to nothing. 

These are the completed upper ball joint adaptors for the front hubs. The two holes bolt to the top part of the hub, where the McPherson strut would attach on a typical DSM. The top hole is slotted on these to allow for camber adjustment. You might have noticed that the one on the left has a shitty slotting job on the top hole; this was actually due to the king of England. So, if you see him, tell him he is a bastard for messing up my ball joint adaptor.  

Here is one of the front bell cranks (bracing not yet added). The reason that these are necessary for me is two-fold. I used coil-over units on the front from a Yamaha R6 motorcycle. While nobody has an absolute number, the spring rate of these is a rumored 500 lb/in. These motorcycle coilovers also have approximately 2.5" of travel. By using them inboard, with these rockers, the spring rate is lowered to a more suitable number, and the travel is increased to a suitable amount. The multiple holes exist so that spring rate can be changed for different circumstances.

Here is the front section, ready to be attached to the rest of the car:

I had ordered up the bodywork well in advance of needing it, just so I could mess with it to see what kinds of physical characteristics it had. Anyways, it's actually High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE), when it first came in; I just had to throw some in place to see how it could look. I chose this material for a number of reasons, none of which had much to do with looks. It was cheap, lightweight, and I wouldn't have to spend any time or money to paint it like fiberglass or metal. I hate painting.

I was bored one day and stopped for a moment to consider where I ought to put the intercooler. I really liked this idea, extremely short piping, up in clean air, and most importantly, ridiculous looking. Unfortunately, thinking ahead to legalize the car for street use, I figured I might have problems with rear visibility. It ended up going behind the engine, where I'm sure it will get plenty of hot, useless air. I'm planning a big duct for it that will be built into the rear bodywork though, that could help things.

All of the parts were pulled off the chassis, and it was time for a nice coat of flat black. Nope, nothing fancy, in true challenge spirit, I used the crappiest paint I could find. It was brushed on (yes, I painted the car with a brush, and it was all I hoped it could be). After it was all covered, I used a couple cans of 99 cent black spray paint in an attempt to hide some of the worse brush marks. I wound up putting the paint in the budget for $30 because I didn't have a receipt, but thinking about it now, it didn't even cost half of that, oh well. Overall, painting a tube-chassis car is interesting, as it seems like you're finished about ten different times, then you realize you missed a spot and you need to pick up the brush and keep going. Well, I suppose it was a nice change from welding for a little while.

Here is some of the Re-assembly on the front end. To give an idea of time, I believe this was mid-late Feb. About a month until the challenge. That's why it's snowing out, and I'm out there working, hoping that I get the car done in time. Of course, I got myself into this predicament, so it was nobody else's fault. When the weather was nice out, I pissed the time away, and never worked on the car, I would choose to pick berries in the meadow, chase butterflies through the valley, and play chess with the old men in the park. Okay, so maybe I just sat on my ass and watched Oprah.  

Well, some nicer weather did prevail, but damn, I was tired of it being so cold out.

All 4 hubs were from the front of a 1G DSM. Obviously, the first set were from the '90 Laser. The second set came from a junk yard, which does a quarterly pull-a-thon. The deal is $35 all you can carry. So, I went one day and carried out a whole load of stuff, most of it for the Locost. I got a set of hubs with CV joints from a non-turbo 92 talon that was at the yard. I needed to convert the hubs from driven to non-driven. This was as simple as cutting the outer cup off of the CV so that it could be bolted into the hub, and do its intended job of holding the wheel bearing in place:

I used two of these radiators (for a Honda Civic), as 4G63's do require a good bit of cooling. I got pretty cocky with the budget by this point, and just bought the two radiators brand new, from eBay. The two of them only were about $120 shipped. The cooling fans were also from eBay, brand new. The cooling fans were never actually even wired up in time for the challenge, so I could have taken them off and removed them from the budget. I ran out of time, and figured that I just wouldn't run the car for any extended period of time until I wired them up, which I still have yet to do.  

More putting the car together, I believe this to be about three weeks before the challenge.

It's a roller, but not a driver yet:

Here is some of the madness going on about a week before the challenge. Just working to route all of the wiring, cables, piping, and so forth.

Here's the work going on up front. Again, making use of every part of the donor car that was possible.

This one was a big deal. Basically, I made a huge careless mistake. I got the steering rack from a swap meet for $20. It was an Aluminum unit from a sprint car, and weighed next to nothing. The problem, which I completely and stupidly overlooked, was that it was for a front-steer car (where the tie rods are positioned in front of the hubs center). The DSM hubs are, of course, rear-steer. What this amounts to is that the rack I had resulted in the reversal of steering inputs. If you turned the wheel left, the car would go right, and vice versa. To fix this problem, I came up with a couple of counter-rotating gears to be spliced into the steering shaft to correct the action. It's not the best solution, but it worked fine and was safer than the alternative.

Yep, it came out looking shabby as hell:

Here is the car 1 DAY before leaving for the challenge (and you were wondering why the bodywork wasn't done):

And here are a few pics of the car at the $2005 challenge: