StanceWorks: 70 Days: The Thrash Begins Now… – Honda-Swapped Ferrari Project

StanceWorks Video Transcript

Foreign November 1st it’s just under 70 days away 69 days if you want to be precise and that’s my self-imposed deadline to complete the Ferrari now to be clear I don’t think the 308 will ever be truly finished but I think in that time frame

We can get it to a point where we can call it complete and ready for its next round of revisions and modifications but if we want to get it done in that amount of time I’ve got to pick up the pace I’ve got a ton of work to do I promised

A few episodes ago that every episode on the Ferrari from here on out would represent more progress and I’d be getting more done so I’m doubling down on that by making sure that progress has to happen thankfully over the last week I have been working like crazy to get

Stuff done I’ve made a ton of progress I feel more motivated about this project than ever before because I work best under pressure so let me show you what we got and done today’s episode begins with a Dusty windshield because we need a place to stick our final checklist and there is

No more appropriate place to put one I’ve done a lot of talking about Crossing things off the list but that doesn’t really mean very much when you don’t have one so I sat down at my desk and wrote down everything I could think of that this car needs for us to call it

Complete by no means is it exhaustive but it’s at least a place to start because we’ve got wiring we’ve got fabrication we’ve got Bodywork and everything in between I left a little bit of room for us to add to the list and I have a feeling we’re going to need

Several more sheets of paper but I’m excited to at least finally cross something off so let’s get the car back up in the air because everything I want to focus on today is at the back of the car The car runs but there are still some Kinks to work out the biggest one being we need to wire in our water pumps for both the intercooler and the engine cooling systems the Rye wire harness uses Deutsch connectors which are to some degree a motorsport grade connector

But the water pumps come with weather pack connectors and honestly I don’t want to keep them I’d rather upgrade all of this and now’s the perfect time to do it Now by no mistake I’ve got a huge collection of Deutsch connectors so we’re going to clip those weather pack

Connectors off and replace them entirely dewitch connectors have a Rubber seal on the back side that’ll waterproof the wire as it enters the connector and then it’s got a seal on the front side that’ll actually weatherproof the entire thing once we plug the male and female halves together

These plugs are really easy to assemble take apart modify and to add pins if we need to in the future which is exactly why they’re perfect for an application like this after cutting off the weather pack connectors and then stripping the wires we’ve got to attach the Deutsch

Connector pins which does require some special tools now be honest I’m using a cheap knockoff of a DMC crimp but it functions exactly the same it’s got some replaceable turret heads which means you can crimp a lot of different connectors with it and the one I’ve got installed is specifically for Deutsch connectors

With it I can crimp the female terminals onto the wires and know there’s no way I’m gonna pull them off the rest of the connector goes together by hand and within a matter of minutes we’ve got both of our water pumps wired in and the cooling system is finally ready to be bled

Next on the list we’ve got to take some stuff apart we’ve got to finish some projects that we left in limbo and complete some new ones all in one Fell Swoop we tacked HD clamp ferrules to both the inlet and the outlet of the compressor housing and it’s time to finish the job

So I got it all wiped down remove the speed sensor plug and got to tigging foreign Housing cooling down on the workbench I turned my attention to the intake which we left tack welded at the end of the last episode At this point we could probably say that the tube work for the intake side of the engine is complete but we’ve got to solve one other problem the HD clamp allows the intake to flop around a lot so we need to add a support Mount that’ll let it move as the engine moves

But it’ll give it some much needed stability after some brainstorming I decided to drill a hole into my wing upright and then to use a quarter inch piece of aluminum as a support I’m going to insert a rubber grommet into the hole we just drilled as an isolator of sorts and

Then we’re gonna attack weld this aluminum rod to the intake itself to finish it out I welded it up on the workbench and I’ll say this one was not my best weld but the support seems to work really well the rubber grommet definitely gives the aluminum support arm itself some freedom

Of movement allowing the intake to articulate with the engine but it holds the intake itself firmly in place and as is always a goal it requires no tools to remove when that time comes so we’ve got three more things we can cross out the list welding the compressor housing welding the intake

Tube and building an intake support all are relatively small but important steps in getting this car finished with those out of the way let’s move to the exhaust I spent some time at the back of the car making sure that both pipes were equidistant from each side of

The car something I hadn’t done in the past they have some adjustability but the problem is making the match means one of the pipes hits part of the chassis on top of modifying the exhaust we’re also gonna have to fix some damage if you look really closely on the right

Hand side you’ll notice there’s a flat spot because I foolishly dropped this thing during installation months ago as much as it pains me step number one is to cut this thing in half I think shortening it by about a half inch should fix our clearance issues and

To hide the fact that we’ve modified it I’m gonna cut the weld out of it the half inch section that I’m removing is the weld itself we can simply clean up the edges and re-weld it and no one that hasn’t seen this episode should be the wiser There is a bit of cleanup work involved on the Belt Sander we’ve got to make sure both ends that we cut are perfectly flat because after all we do need this tube to line up with where it was before but with just a bit more clearance I wouldn’t have guessed that using the

Chair as a dolly along with a claw hammer would have fixed the flat spot in the tailpipe but honestly it worked perfect you can’t even tell that it was there I tacked everything together off camera test fitted it on the car to make sure

It was going to line up the way that we wanted and then proceeded to purge weld the entire thing so we can cross this off the list as well as I continue to learn to TIG and get more comfortable doing it I can safely say at this point welding stainless is

My favorite material so far if you want to get started on TIG welding and are trying to figure out where to begin I’d suggest with stainless because it’s got the easiest characteristics to work with and it seems to turn out better than I expect pretty much every time foreign

Now on to the next problem currently both of these exhaust pipes are held on solely by their v-band clamps which means as they heat up both exhausts we’ll try to rotate themselves towards the ground they need some supports and some of you guys may remember the tabs

That we welded to the chassis for a previous oil cooler setup that we didn’t follow through on we’re going to repurpose these tabs and use some rubber mounts that I got on McMaster Carr to help support the exhaust they have a lot of movement built into them which should help as the engine

Moves through the Rev range and as the exhaust expands and contracts as it heats up and cools down and worry not I’ve got these ultra high temp versions just in case we melt the black ones with the heat from the exhaust to support the exhaust itself we need

Some tabs so I’m using some stainless steel bar stock to match the material with which we’ve built the exhaust from I cut them out on the bandsaw shaped them on the Belt Sander and then took them over to the workbench and drilled some holes last but not least I contoured the

Bottom of these tabs to match the curvature of the exhaust pipe so that we can weld it all together I tacked everything into place on the car to make sure that it would all line up and to be honest I thought about finish welding everything in place too I

Figured I could probably just Purge the entire engine and exhaust system all in one go but I realized I’d probably melt our new rubber mounts if I did this so everything came off of the car and went over to the workbench for purging and Welding for those that aren’t familiar the

Aluminum foil keeps our shielding gas inside of the exhaust to prevent sugaring on the inside the result is that we’ve got nice strong mounts that aren’t likely to crack or fatigue unless we really get this thing hot again this exhaust Mount solution was really simple and I’m happy to have repurposed

Those tabs that we welded in place previously we can now say that the wastegate pipe has been shortened and the exhaust is officially supported and we can cross those off the list as well in a recent episode I built a drain line for the turbo to our sump tank and some

Of you guys pointed out that we’ve got way too much droop in the line that the low point will keep the Turbo from draining properly and honestly I’m glad you guys pointed it out because this is definitely wrong today we’re gonna fix it which means everything’s got to come off the car

Once again so that we can add a new port to this box so that the drain line can have better flow characteristics bung positioned it directly below the one we currently have and then went through the process of drilling a hole prepping the metal and getting this thing welded into place

For whatever reason welding this particular bungon gave me nothing but trouble I had so many weld contamination issues that it brought back memories of my first time ever trying to weld aluminum at all I thought heavily about cutting off the original bung and capping over it but I

Couldn’t come up with a solution that looked good so instead we’re just gonna cap it maybe it’ll be useful later or maybe not but I think this is the best solution I remade our drain hose one more time and then got everything reinstalled on the car and I’m happy to say at this

Point we can call this successful we’ve got a good dream path out of the bottom of the turbo in into our sump tank with no impedance to flow I think one of the best parts and sometimes worst Parts about putting everything on YouTube is that it definitely holds you accountable for

Every corner you cut but I’m thankful that you guys are willing to call me on it when I cut corners or correct me when I’m wrong because in this case you definitely saved me a turbo and I learned something all that we have left on the turbo is

Plumbing in the coolant which we’ll figure out in a future episode so from here I moved to the top of the engine and changed one of the engine grounds as directed by Ryan from ryewire and that means we can cross our turbo drain line and a cylinder head ground off of the list

Now let’s transfer to the suspension when I was prepping to set the car down onto the ground for the very first time I tacked some toe link boxes onto the chassis if we look at the passenger side things look great the box is square and Plumb to Earth exactly as it should be

Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the driver’s side of the car if we look at the mount from behind you’ll notice that it’s definitely leaning down towards the ground it’s not mounted level as it should be and there’s also some pretty egregious gaps we’d have to fill

Somehow I didn’t notice this when I first tacked it into place but I’m going to chalk it up to being excited to getting the car onto the ground and maybe rushing things a bit some of the welds were easily accessed with an angle grinder but other ones not

So much I needed a hammer in order to free this thing from the chassis so that we can clean it up and get it lined up properly I ground down the welds so that when we put it back on the chassis there’s no interference and then because some idiot smashed this thing off of the chassis with a hammer I had a lot of dings and dents to clean up before it went back into place

Opposite the inner Mount is the outer Mount And if you guys remember from a previous episode I showcased one problem we were gonna face because it’s mounted with a single bolt it was likely going to Pivot around this bolt if we applied any load such as a high cornering Force

My solution for this was to Anchor it with a second Point using one of the bolts that holds the Hub and wheel bearing into place I templated a part to solve this problem and anchor it to one of these bolts and now we need to make it so let’s rinse and repeat

I went over the bandsaw and then the belt grinder and then of course drilled some holes once again and then I welded it into place on the car the result is a support that should keep this Mount from pivoting under any circumstance with that out of the way now we need to

Make some new toe links here is the old one I built this in a previous episode and the major issue with it is twofold one it’s round which means we can’t get a wrench on it and two if you look at the end of the tube nuts you’ll notice a Groove this

Indicates that both ends of this toe link are left hand thread because this Mount has left hand threads on each end if we want to adjust it it means we need to drop one end rotate the heim joint a half turn and reinstall it it’s not infinitely adjustable turning

The center Rod while it’s installed on the car literally wouldn’t do anything so with the help of my buddy Brett Walker we machined some new ones they function the same in concept but this time around they’ve got right hand threads on one side and left hand threads on the other as identified by

The tick marks on the end it might be Overkill but they’re made from solid hex bar Steel stock so I know they’re going to be safe and stout enough for track use and because these things are made from hex bar stock we can now use a wrench to

Grab a hold of them making it a lot easier to tighten or loosen the jam nuts for each heim joint with it installed in the car you can see that by rotating the center of this tow link we can actually adjust the toe in or out depending on which direction we

Rotate it and that’s the beauty of having both left and right hand threads we’re missing the inner Jam nut on these but otherwise I think it’s safe to call these done as well so let’s get that checklist out we fixed the toe link mounts on the inside added supports for

The outer mounts and revise the toe links themselves there’s still some more work to be done in the rear end but we’re pretty close to wrapping it up now let’s move topside all right now for a Not So Glamorous fix but an important one a lot of you guys

Have pointed out that we’ve got a clearance issue between this cam sensor here and the intercooler end tank and they are touching it would be a problem to try to drive the car this way we would rub through the wires pretty quickly and then the car is not going to

Run but thankfully some of you guys pointed out a pretty simple fix to Showcase this fix I need to remove the sensor which means dropping the intercooler and I thought this would be a huge Endeavor in order to get this sensor out but thankfully there’s just

Enough wiggle room to pull it off with just two bolts removed this is the sensor that was in place and as you can see the plug extends directly outwards but thankfully some of you guys pointed out that a TSX sensor is the same thing only with a perpendicular plug Direction

I did some research and it does show that these sensors should be completely interchangeable and this should solve our problem installed in the car it’s clear we have a ton more room than we did before however we’re not out of the woods quite yet if I show you just below the sensor we

Replaced there’s the coolant temp sensor in the cylinder head and it faces the same problem so if any of you guys know of an interchangeable coolant temp sensor with a 90 degree fitting please let me know but for now that’s another thing we can cross off our list

All right now let’s talk about the exterior of the car let’s talk style for a second I’ve done a lot of mulling over about what to do for lighting on this thing and as a recap I don’t want the pop-ups to pop up on this car anymore

Now in my opinion these headlights look amazing down that’s how the car was designed and they look really silly when they’re up they look like Frog’s eyes or something I’m not a fan of it I don’t ever want them to pop up again now some of you guys have had suggestions about

What to do to solve that some of you have said do like a slim pop-up with an LED not really the look that I’m after and again I just don’t want them up some of you guys have said get rid of them do lights down below and extend those

Grills all the way to the front of the car I photoshopped that and it really kind of disrupts the way the car looks and then last but not least some of you guys have said do a Lamar style headlight where we build an inset headlight underneath the cover and put a

Lexan cover over it here’s a car where that was done and it can look cool but again just not really what I’m after I’m a fan of the way the 288 GTO looks it’s got four driving lights down below and yeah it still has pop-ups but if we can

Use those driving lights as a headlight alternative that would kind of land somewhere that I’m happy with I’ve been struggling to decide exactly what to put in the front of the car but I think I found something that should look pretty cool I took a little bit of a gamble on

This we’re gonna have to mount them before we really know but let me show you what I bought these are hella jumbo 220s some cool old school period correct driving lights that should look the part on the car they’ve got some awesome black and white

Covers to go over the lenses and I think they should offer a somewhat Motorsport inspired alternative to a 288 lighting setup now to be clear these things are big we’re only gonna run one on each side of the car but given the fact that it’s a square

Lens with a nice black housing I think that in place it should have a nice somewhat Factory looking aesthetic once we install them now check these things out on the car all I can do at the moment without actual brackets is to just rest them in

Place on the valance but still if we step back these things look like they were meant for the car they fit the hole in the valance perfectly The positioning does need a little bit of refinement and it’ll take some fine tuning in order to figure out exactly how they should sit in the front of the car because if I point them down and out just a little bit they flow with the lines of the air dam and Valance like

They were made for it but this might offer some bad lighting Dynamics with the covers off they arguably look even better like they could have been an option from Ferrari if you’re asking me it’s going to take some work to figure out how to mount them effectively but

I’m really happy with this lighting solution and I think the finished product should look the way I imagine it in my head so we can officially cross solving the light problem off of the list but now we’ve got a few more problems to add such as mounting wiring so on and so

Forth but we’ve got more episodes to go so we’ll add it to the list if you liked this episode please consider leaving a like and if you haven’t subscribed yet you should both of those methods are how we tell the YouTube algorithm that you liked what

You saw that you want the channel to grow and that more people can see episodes just like this one and keep that in mind for other content creators that you watch too those guys that are pouring their Heart and souls out into their videos in their garages their

Workshops or literally anywhere else the best way you can help them doesn’t even cost you anything but with all that said I’ve got new merchandise coming out next week I’m really excited about it it’s my favorite stuff that I’ve probably ever done you guys are going to dig it the

Patreon subscribers already have access to it if you want to snag it before anything sells it out not that it will but you never know and in any case I appreciate your support in literally any fashion I’m just stoked you guys are here to watch

I’ll see you guys at the end of the week I’ve got an awesome box showing up actually this afternoon that has coilovers for the Ferrari and they are insane I am super stoked to show you like I said progress progress progress we’ve got lots of stuff to get done got

To see more on Friday I’ll see you then thanks as always for the support foreign