StanceWorks: I Work Well Under Pressure… but this is insane. June 21st?! – The Biggest Ep. Yet

StanceWorks Video Transcript

Foreign There are a few times in my Automotive career that I have been more stressed than I am right now I have been killing myself to get this car ready to go on track so we can drive it in the next episode whether it works or not that’s

Going to happen but to make matters more stressful I found out three days ago that our ship date to send this car to Australia has been moved up to June 21st I literally have one month to get this car ready to compete on a track on the other side of the planet

I’ve got my work cut out for me but I feel pretty good about it let’s keep the pedal down I have been killing it for the last week so let’s dive into the biggest episode yet in the last episode we spent the entire week with Riley at RS Motorsport fitting

And installing a roll cage that is without question the best it could possibly be but on the note of safety we’ve got a bit more safety equipment we need to get installed in this car so that is ready for competition first on the list is a Lifeline fire

Suppression system and I’ve opted for a 2.25 kilogram Novak 1230 extinguishant which believe it or not is a real word we’re limited on Space inside of the car but thankfully there’s just enough room behind the kick plate we installed at the base of the passenger footwell the kick plate can be removed for

Scrutineering and the gauge itself will sit proud of the top so we can keep an eye on it at any point there are a lot of ways to actuate a system like this but I have opted for old-fashioned pool cables I’m a fan of this over worrying about whether or not

The electronics will work when I really need it this system also utilizes five individual extinguisher nozzles three for the engine bay and two for inside of the car with me the golden nozzles for the engine bay produce a 160 degree fan while the blue ones for inside of the car are reduced

To 120 for focus on the driver and passenger getting all of these parts installed will require some custom bracketry so a few weeks ago I sent an order out to send cut send and now we’re ready to dive in first up is a bracket so we can mount a

Pull cable to the outside of the car our fire system comes with two one for inside and one for outside in case of the worst as is required by most Motorsport rule sets I spent a while trying to decide where to mount the exterior pull cable but after realizing

There was nowhere both good and safe to do it at the front I’ve decided to mount it at the very back of the car I used a DIY plumb bob to get it lined up between the passenger tail lights because if I’m gonna Mount this thing so

It’s obviously visible I at least want it to be centered and to look good with the mount bolted into place it’s time to run the cable up to the extinguisher bottle itself I decided to get a little bit crafty on how to pull this installation off the Ferrari was originally equipped with

A cable operated e-brake which means there are tubes that run from inside the car to the back of the car through which the original cable passed the pull cable for the fire extinguisher system and its sheathing fit inside of these tubes so I passed them up and to

The front of the car through the tube work making for a protected and stealth installation of fixing the cable to the tank itself just requires a set screw and so with that one of the cables is done the installation of the back of the car looks pretty decent it’s race car-esque

I probably prefer it without it but as a whole I think it works and it’s a reminder of just how far down the race car path we’ve gone to ice the cake I’ve got our extinguisher decal applied even though we’re going to be re-wrapping the car before it heads off to Australia

Now up next should be installing the interior pull cable but in order to do that we’re going to need a complicated Mount that it will share with the shift lever for our sway bar so we’ll pause here because in order to install that we need to install the sway bar first but

To install the sway bar we need to get the car up in the air and to get the car up in the air we need to redo the shelving behind it now I’ll agree that building shelving doesn’t sound like a crucial step in finishing the Ferrari

But look at the size of the crate this stuff showed up in it’s completely blocking the door and I want to move the Audi and put the Ferrari in its place so we’ve got to get stuff assembled and moved around Die Hard fans of the channel might be

Familiar with the messy shelves that have been behind the Audi for the last 10 years I’ve been in this shop as fans of the channel the team at lavorax said hey we’ve got a solution for that they were then kind enough to send over one of their 12-foot leverax

Systems and thus the afternoon spent assembling the thing was time very well spent the leverax system completely transformed this corner of the shop both aesthetically and organizationally for once everything over here is organized and I know where it all is and stuff isn’t spilling off the shelves in between takes behind my car

If you aren’t familiar with this system the units slide back and forth to reveal shelves hidden between them and this means I’ve got significantly more storage space than I had in this same footprint before I’ve only filled up about half of these leverax shelves versus the absolute stuffed full shelves

That I had before so a special thank you to leverack for supporting the channel and for the shop space and making it that much better but with the shelving install complete now we can move the Audi and put the Ferrari in its place get it up on jack

Stands and start sorting out our suspension given the fact that we redesigned our own uprights and control arms the factory sway bars are no longer configured to work properly and even if they were there are no good 308 sway bar upgrades available on the market so as with everything else on this car

We’re going custom and I’ve sourced this double bladed adjustable sway bar but it’s not any ordinary adjustable sway bar this one can be adjusted from inside the car while driving now I first learned about sway bars like this from the 80s E30 DTM race cars these cars were equipped with driver

Adjustable sway bars using levers that were within the driver’s reach both for the front and rear of the car it’s kind of tough to find photos of these sway bars on the cars but if we look at some in-car video of one in action and we zoom in right by the

Driver’s right knee you’ll see one of these quote-unquote shift levers right within his reach by pushing or pulling on this shift lever he’s able to operate a push-pull cable and rotate the blades of the sway bar to increase or decrease its stiffness with the blade of the sway bar turned

Vertically like you see here this has the sway bar at its stiffest because the sway bar end must Flex on its thickest axis but by rotating the sway bar blade we are now asking it to flex on a thinner axis it becomes easier to do and thus less stiff

Now to find a sway bar that fit the Ferrari I took a bunch of measurements only to realize that it’s incredibly close to a Porsche 997 so that’s what this bar is out of and believe it or not if you combine a Porsche 997 front sway bar with mounts

Out of a 2015 Camaro it becomes a bolt-on affair the ends of this sway bar are splined as our most race applications so I made marks and indexed everything before I took it apart I removed the Delrin bushings from the Porsche bar and then swapped poly bushings and mounts on from

The Chevrolet and reassembled so I could fit it to the car it will be installed exactly where the original Ferrari sway bar sat in our case it’s directly behind and underneath the radiator for what it’s worth I think with some crafty end links this would

Work on any 308 but in our case it’s a perfect fit we can install the Camaro mounts and they bolt to the original bolt-in provisions of the Ferrari chassis with the other arm installed and everything bolted down the sway bar is officially fitted to the car and now we

Just need an end link solution to attach it to the control arm we’re working within very limited space and so the end link is going to be short I’m just going to use a male and female rod end as an end link solution simple if not Overkill

So my initial plan for this was to take an end link and attach it to the sway bar and then figure out how to attach it to the upper control arm there’s no room on the bottom and I figured this would be a nice simple approach and by

Drilling one hole and using one bolt we drill a hole in the top of this I’d be able to just bolt this to the upper control arm and then bolt this to the rod end if I can put it together with one hand just like that and with a

Single hole and a single bolt I’d have a complete sway bar setup but I realize there’s one problem after having Brett machine these out and that’s that this is a compressive ball joint and putting a sway bar on the upper control arm would put this in

Tension it would be trying to pull the ball joint apart some ball joints are meant for that but this one is not and I don’t want it to fail so this idea nice and simple although heavy it’s back to the drawing board we got to figure something else out

Unfortunately any solution we come up with is going to require some welding and some of you may remember that in the last episode my torch took a dump and sprung a leak so we’ll need to replace it before we can stick metal to metal I went out and bought another CK

Worldwide Flex head TIG torch because I’m in love with the way that it works and I genuinely think that having the ability to flex the TIG torch head has made my welds better at least it’s given me better positioning overall unwrapping and re-wrapping 25 feet of TIG torch lead cover is probably the

Worst part of the job but with that done we’re ready to get back to it I fought tooth and nail not to have to pull the suspension apart but ultimately I decided the best solution was to modify the lower control arm and to give it a pickup point for the sway bar so

That everything would play nicely together for better or worse because I built so many control arms at this point I also have a drawer full of tabs to make them luckily I have some tabs that are perfectly suited towards being a sway bar pickup point and they fit the

Control arm with zero modification so I’m going to make this change permanent and weld them on with the control arms reinstalled and the end links fitted we can cross the sway bar itself off of the list but now we’ve got to talk about how the adjustment works what I have here is the

Push pull adjustment lever it attaches to a cable and operates the blade on the end of the sway bar by rotating it pushing it forwards or backwards will rotate it in the respective Direction but it requires a bit of force to operate so it’s going to need a sturdy

Mount inside of the car I’ve decided I want this thing mounted right next to the transmission shifter mostly because I’ll know where it is mentally and to keep the interior from becoming cluttered I fired up Fusion 360 and I drew this simple sheet metal Mount or at least it

Looks simple but it was perhaps one of the most complicated things I’ve drawn so far believe it or not I used bends on different axes to orient the shift lever correctly inside of the car despite the angled Mount surface they should be strong enough to push and

Pull the cable that will in turn turn The bladed sway bar the only catch is I’m going to need that mount from cencut send before we can actually order a cable that will fit the car correctly so we can cross the sway bar as a whole off the list

Now let’s turn our attention to the dashboard we had to remove it to install the roll cage and now it doesn’t fit back into place it can’t go in from the front due to the angle of the a-pillars and the increased width of the roll bar

Itself and it can’t fit in from the front even with the windshield removed notching it doesn’t alleviate the problem so we’d have to Lop both ends off and I’m not really happy with that solution but even if I was because we moved the steering column the Pinnacle

That holds the dash wouldn’t be centered so ultimately we’re gonna have to build a new Dash panel from scratch that mimics the shape of the original clearly though that’s a huge project to undertake and we don’t have the time for it so let’s try something different

Some of you may remember the Ender 3 3D printer that I bought almost a year ago I got the whole thing put together but ran into a number of problems that over the course of the last year no one has been able to solve and so it’s sat

Collecting dust this entire time but if you’re thinking what I’m thinking no we’re not going to 3D print an entire dashboard but I did buy a bamboo Labs x1c carbon 3D printer after everyone on the stanceworks Discord insisted this was the machine to get it seems to be the buzz of the 3D

Printing world right now and as someone who wants a 3D printing experience that requires no setup no headache no hassle and just the simple click of a button I was promised this was where to get it now because I like diving into the deep end head first I fired up Fusion 360 and

Drew up a mount for our haltec ic7 Digital dash I then asked the 3D printer to make it a reality and printed it using carbon fiber reinforced nylon what you see here are the first prints from my machine with no setup and no experience whatsoever and to say that

I’m impressed is a massive understatement I included Provisions for embedded Hardware so that the nuts and bolts would be captive and I printed it at a 100 infill which made for a part so strong I am unable to break it by hand I then printed a backing plate for the

Dash itself yielding a mount that can clamp to the tube work inside of the car so we can forgo a traditional dash for the time being and then for a Finishing Touch I printed a visor for the system and if this doesn’t showcase what this printer is capable of in completely inexperienced

Hands I don’t know what will the Finish quality and the strength of these parts is absolutely incredible and I can already tell I’m going to be using the hell out of this machine foreign to see how these 3D printed Parts work out in the long run but my initial

Assessment is that they are incredible the pieces fit together like machined Parts with proper tolerances and they look like it too I’ve always been hesitant to incorporate 3D printing into my workflow because I’ve never felt like these machines could deliver Parts I’d be happy with but here we are

Some of you may remember in one of the previous episodes we mounted a pair of kill switches to the car one on the cowl and one inside the one mounted to the cow had a nice easy to solve home I simply put it in one of the original wiper mounting holes

But inside the car I kind of mocked it up and said I’d need to come up with a solution and thus as always I turned to Fusion 360 and send cut send and wound up with this bracket we’re going to mount to the underside of the original Dash panel

Because I’ll be torquing on the key and because I want to mount some other stuff to this I want to weld up a reinforcement to each side of it so I heated up the material to get some good penetration without having the weld run away from me and made it all one piece One of the design constraints I had to consider while designing this Mount was that I needed to be able to reach it while strapped into the seat which is why it protrudes so far from the dash bar itself but because it protrudes we do have a

Nice surface on top of it with which we can mount something and it’s here that I’d like to mount my aim solo to because I’ll be moving the aim solo from car to car I want to use a standard RAM mount if you aren’t familiar with what an aim

Solo is it is an onboard lap timer that also records Telemetry while you’re racing it can wirelessly download your lap information to the computer once you’re done with a session and give you immediate feedback about where you’re losing time and where you’re gaining it it’s one of the gold standards of lap

Timing so we’re going to run it in conjunction with our haltech systems with the solo and our Dash mounted in the car things are starting to feel way more complete if not way more sparse than they used to I’m really happy with the 3D printed mounts for the ic7 and this stuff will

Work as a great stop Gap while I think about how to build a complete dashboard whether that’s before Australia or after but hold on a second if I have a 3D printer but we were waiting on a bracket from send cut send to finish our fire system installation what if we just 3D

Print that bracket as a mock-up so we can install both the shifter and the fire system pull cables so that’s exactly what I did this one’s just a quick and dirty pla print but even still the quality is impressive and better yet it does a perfect job of illustrating that our

Sway bar adjuster will clear whether we’re swinging it forwards or backwards mocked up in the car it’s looking exactly as intended it clears the base of the transmission shifter perfectly and once I reroute our power cables to the other side of the shifter as they were originally everything should clear

Without error I’ll need to order up the correct cable length and hopefully we can have that finished up for the next episode as far as the fire extinguisher pull cable goes our bracket bolts to the top of it and this allows me to cut the cable to length and install it to the

Fire bottle for final installation once we have the finished bracket if we want to finish out our fire system installation we need to install the nozzles it’s important that these nozzles are held up by brackets and not just the hosing itself that supplies them with extinguishing thankfully my buddy John was willing to

Help out and fabbed up some brackets while I was working on other projects allowing me to return to this one and get it wrapped up quickly as mentioned previously both blue nozzles are mounted in the cabin both under the dash pointed towards the driver I’ve got the yellow nozzles mounted in

The engine bay and I’m just waiting on a bit more hose so I can finish the plumbing on the notion of fire safety I’ve also decided I’m going to install an element fire extinguisher in the event there’s a fire that doesn’t warrant pulling the cable on the novex system

An element extinguisher isn’t going to stop a fire if something like my fuel cell ruptures but it can handle Fires at scale it’s perfect for use in a confined space like inside of a car or in an engine bay in the event I want to stop

The car from burning to a crisp without having to go Full Tilt and pull the fire extinguisher system I’ve had friends with cars burned to the ground and I’ve had my own garage burned to the ground so I’ll take every bit of help I can get I’ve got it mounted where

I can easily access it from the driver’s seat or anybody coming up to the car can grab it too lastly it’s in the perfect spot to grab if I’m exiting the car in the event of a big fire and still have some flames on me to extinguish

Now let’s shift gears entirely and start on a new project some of you may remember at the beginning of the build that we ran our coolant lines through the car’s rocker panels as opposed to through the middle of the car where they were originally placed from the factory

The reason for this is that the middle of the cars occupied by the water lines for the intercooler system and the Rockers are bigger and allow us to run Dash 20 lines through them but during my time at RS Motorsport I explained that we had to remove the

Coolant lines from the rocker panels as the plates that we welded in for the cage to attach to prohibit the lines from passing through the Rockers at this point but we still need to find a way to get our coolant lines to the front of the

Car to the radiator and have decided the best way to do that is to go through the inside of the car now to make this competition legal and to make it safe we’re going to drill some holes in the car and use bulkhead fittings to pass coolant lines from the

Car’s exterior to the interior these bulkheads will utilize Dash 20 orb fittings and allow me to attach an an hose to each side of it the goal here is to minimize the number of fittings inside of the vehicle which in turn minimizes the opportunities for a leak or a hose rupture

We’ll need four bulkhead fittings in total two at the back of the car and two in the front I’ve got one placed high on the rear firewall where it can exit from the engine heading towards the radiator and one mounted low headed back towards the water pump

But solving the engine side of this problem is simple it’s getting coolant to the radiator through the front firewall that’s the problem initially I was going to pass these bulkhead fittings through the Gap that I created in front of our coolant overflow bottle but it turns out there are a

Number of reasons that’s not doable on the other hand there’s a ton of real estate behind the coolant bottle before we get to the dash bar of the roll cage more importantly I can get access to that space if I cut out the plastic ducting for the original air

Conditioning system it’s one of the few unused cavities of space left on this car and we’re going to make use of it now I wouldn’t count on this to work if we hadn’t added those bleed and steam ports to the front end in one of our previous episodes but because we have

Them I’m going to loop our Dash 20 hoses from the rear firewall up the front firewall and back towards our cavity before they pierce it and then head towards the front of the car on the other side of the panel is another pair of 90 degree fittings that

Send the coolant to their respective sides of the radiator from here it’s business as usual where we’ll retain our Steam and bleed ports at each side of the car bleeding might be tricky but I think we can pull it off but with all these hoses running through

The car I decided I needed a way to organize them and at least keep them looking good so cue that 3D printer once again I’ve decided to print a set of Dash 20 hose clamps that will pair off and organize the hoses as they run through the middle of the car

These two are printed from carbon fiber reinforced nylon which is work rated up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit which should play well with the hot coolant lines considering that they won’t really be under any stress but given that I did print them at 100 infill which makes these the strongest parts that I’ve

Printed so far despite being thin and spindly I was completely unable to break them by hand meaning I think they’ll hold up just fine now I know I’m acting like a dude who just got a 3D printer because I am one but I am so stoked on having the ability

To just make Parts on the Fly I am sure there will be more in this episode and More in plenty of episodes to come whether they’re functional and an end use part or just for prototyping this is such a game changer I should have done this years ago I’m bummed that I let

That other one sit for so long and that I didn’t pull the trigger on something like this because this is just beyond cool and once you have a functional part I’ve never got to buy something like this again if I need them I just click print and I make more it’s incredible I

I know I’m stating the obvious to everybody with a 3D printer out there but if you’re on the fence about getting one of these do it ASAP this is too sick I’m gonna 3D print an entire car the clamps worked perfectly and they’re a wonderful proof of concept but I will

Have to revise them a bit because there is some sheathing we’ll have to put over these hoses to be competition legal but for the time being as far as Plumbing goes we can cross this off the list Lastly I had GT pads of belts but given that the rest of the car has more or less Gone full race car I decided I wanted the seat to match I want as much safety as possible so I reached out to racetech and asked if they’d be interested in partnering up

And luckily they said yes and as a result they sent over a model 4119 full containment seat as for differences between this seat and my last one there are some quality of life improvements such as better padding and ventilation in the seat back but what I’m really interested in are the

Mounts built within the back of the seat for a seat back anchor and that might be overkill for what I’m going to be doing with the car but as said I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it but installing this Race Tech

Seat means we’ve got to design some new seat mounts getting the seat into the car is a battle in and of itself it barely fits through the Gap we have in our door bars but thankfully it clears by a few millimeters and drops into place I mentioned in our previous episode that

We have changed the driving position of the car by moving the seat towards the middle and with the race Tech in place we can see just how far over it is compared to the original mounts in the floor it shifted over by several inches so we’ll need a mount that accounts for

This and the additional lean back of the seat compared to its original mounts I fired up Fusion 360 and designed a mount that works in two or technically three pieces two side mounts and a base plate that adapts between the car and where the seat wants to be situated

I’ll be having send cut send cut this out of 3 16 aluminum and because I was a little bit worried about offsetting the seat I had my friends on the stanceworks Discord perform a finite element analysis to confirm that this Mount will be more than strong enough

As a result now we just wait for the seat mounts to arrive Next on our list we’ve got to meet more rules for the Australian World Time attack challenge the rules state that we need a 2 liter catch can so we’ll be swapping out our original vibrant performance unit for a bigger one when I told them I needed one and in a

Hurry they were willing to send their updated version over along with all of the plumbing we’ve used so far aside from being bigger the Gen 3 catch can includes larger orb an fittings a revised Mount and better ventilation geometry as is probably obvious the first step in

Getting the new one installed is to remove the old one but with the old one removed we can compare it and the new one side by side and most importantly we can compare the mounts the mount on the new tank comes pre-bent but thankfully vibrant kept the exact

Same hole spacing so aside from being a bit bigger in length and overall diameter it will be a straight bolt-in swap to the modified Mount we had before the only hurdle we’re gonna face is the fact that the new tank runs dash 12 fittings and our hose is a dash 10. we

Need a fitting that looks like the one on the right except this one is a male to male Union but what you may not know is that orb fittings are the same as males without the flare we can convert this right hand fitting to the one on the left by just chucking

It in the lathe and machining it down so that’s exactly what I did but don’t be mistaken I still have no idea how to use this Lathe for anything else other than this but it comes in handy for Times Like These and with a simple operation our fitting will thread

Right into place and adapt to our old dash 10 hose there’s no doubt this was the smallest and most boring job of the episode but it was an important one that we needed to do to keep us competition legal and with that it’s an important one that we

Now cross off the list once again And now we are on to the final job of the episode if you remember a few episodes ago I showcased some new SKF wheel hubs and I expressed the need to upgrade to these because the factory units I have on the car currently simply don’t hold up to race abuse

But because I redrilled my car to 5×114.3 I had to send these new hubs across the street to Brett to get machined and we just got them back with these installed we will be ready for True race abuse through the corners and we’ll get wheel speed sensors for a

Future trash control and ads upgrade it’s worth noting that while I was working on all the other projects in this episode it was my buddy John Salerno that tackled the installation of these and I would not have been able to get this far without his help

And on that same note there’s also my buddy Blake who’s been busy on the computer side of things tackling The Livery design for the Ferrari we’ve struggled with some ideas on what direction to take but he’s been narrowing it down slowly but surely and I think you guys are going to love what

He eventually comes up with All right so let’s talk about what’s left on the car that we need to get done before we can actually drive it as said this is the last episode before we actually drive it I promise I’m going to drive it in the next one that’s my cool

I’ll just delay the episode if I have to as far as chassis goes there’s a handful of things that we need to do we need to get the correct spring rates on the car that’s probably the biggest one h r is sending over some new Springs they’ll be a bit

Stiffer I’m going to show you guys the process of measuring our motion ratio and then solving for what we want our wheel rate to be versus our spring rate I want to get the correct springs on the car so it’s stiff enough it’s too soft

In the moment and I want to get Bump Stop Packers installed so we don’t blow a fender up engine wise Driveline wise I think we are good to go my only note that I have at the moment I think going off memory is I need to put a plug in the top of

The transmission I think everything else should be set we should be ready to go beat on this thing inside the car obviously we need to get our seat mounting we need to get it folded up and installed I’ve got to figure out the seat back mount on our

Seat and we got to get our seat belts installed safety equipment that really is first and foremost before anything else I’m not driving the car without a seat belt in it I got to get our sway bar shifter set up and I got to get our cable run because

The sway bar would freely rotate as it is that’s not good while we drive and I’ve got to put some sheathing on the coolant lines running through the car so that we are safe in case one Springs a leak if it explodes if we have some pressure spike who knows what I don’t

Want to cover myself in scalding boiling hot coolant ideally everything else inside should be good to go we’ve got all our kill switches set up under the hood I think is pretty good I don’t think there’s anything else we need to do otherwise I know that we need to go

Through and we need to nut and bolt check the entire car every single bolt got to go through we’ll paint the heads as we get them torqued it’s going to take probably a day to go through and do I’ve got one steering link to replace you know honestly I think that’s about

It there’s I’m sure there’s some small stuff here and there but that covers pretty much everything I think that’s all of our safety equipment I mean obviously we know the car drives I’ve driven it already but I want to go for a real drive in it ideally I want to get

It out to streets of Willow for a test day uh next week might be optimistic it’s going to be depending on their schedule my buddy will is going to come out going to help we’re going to go out and do our first Shakedown session that will be

Within the next you know 14 days presumably otherwise I don’t know I’m probably rambling I think we’re all set we just need uh we need that mount inside the car so that we have our uh fire extinguisher poles I think all of our safety equipment’s done cars I mean

It runs well should be set suspension wise we got to get it aligned alignment is important and I’m rambling at this point so I’m going to cut this episode off here if you have made it this far bless you I appreciate your support wouldn’t be able to do this without you

Guys and on that note we are working on the new livery for the car and with the new livery we’re working on some new merch we’re going to do like a hoodie and a shirt I think maybe not a hoodie it’s had in the summertime we’re gonna

Do a shirt or two a keychain and some other small stuff that is all kind of built around the Livery for the car it will all go directly towards supporting the race program for this thing all of the costs that I’ve been incurring on getting this thing ready it’s been

Eating me alive so think of it as a way for you guys to sponsor this project directly because I wouldn’t be able to do it without you and I’m here because of you guys so thank you it’s fun to return something to you guys to provide something in return for that anyways

Enough rambling I’m done I promise this is it I’ll see you guys next time next episode I’ll be driving it see you then