StanceWorks: The Honda K24-Swapped Ferrari: The FIRST DRIVE!

StanceWorks Video Transcript

Foreign Ly every single dollar and every single hour I’ve had available to me over the last two and a half years has gone into this project right here to get to this moment right now we are finally going to drive the k-24 swap Ferrari now I’ve

Driven it on and off the dyno before and around the parking lot but today I want to make sure that it’s ready to go up to the track on Friday for our first scheduled test and Shakedown session stuff’s gonna break and I need to know what it’s going to be we’ve been working

To get to this moment for so long I’m stoked that we’re here and I’m glad you guys are here with me we’ve got a ton of work to do before it actually happens the car is still sitting on jack stands I’ve got a ton of fabrication for you

Guys in this episode so let’s get to it and I’ll say if you haven’t subscribed yet please consider doing so your support means a lot to me it helps this channel grow it’s a free easy way to show some support and I don’t want you

To miss the next episode when we put the car on track for the first time let’s get to work in the to-do list at the end of the last episode I neglected to point out that we still have to figure out a solution for our windshield

We had to remove the original glass unit for installation of the roll cage and during its removal it cracked an expectation given the fact that the original windshield is glued in the downside though is that given the fact that these Ferrari 308s are handmade no two cars are quite alike and

Getting a glass replacement is an impossibility given our current time frame the car needs to leave the country in just two weeks so we’re forced to go the DIY route and I’ve ordered a huge sheet of polycarbonate lexan plastic admittedly this is even further down the path towards total and complete race car

But I want to do this without it being a permanent change so let’s see what we can conjure up we’re going to use the original glass windshield to make a template considering it’s at least holding its original shape and we’re going to use the cardboard that the

Lexan came in in order to make that template so I taped the glass and the cardboard together while Chloe oversaw the project and after a bit of work I was left with a cardboard template that is an exact copy of the original glass unit but if you’re tackling a windshield project for

Yourself it’s important to make sure that your cardboard template fitment is absolutely perfect so I refined the edges to make sure that it fits within the channel and so that the original aluminum windshield trim can clip in around it I want as Factory of an install as we can get

And although the car is small it has a big windshield for its size so we’ve only got one shot because we can only cut one windscreen out of a single sheet so transferring the template means we’ve got to get this perfect we can’t add any material back if we cut it too small

Once everything felt squared away I used an air saw to cut the perimeter of the lexan and then used a DA to finish the edges for most cars I’d also suggest painting the edge of the lexan black but given that we’ve got trim to go around

It I’m not going to bother but that does bring us to how we’re going to attach it I use senka send a laser cut some steel tabs and then use my Bender to bend a handful of them to different profiles these will clamp the windshield into place

But unlike on most classic cars where the brackets are held to the body using screws or rivets we’re gonna flip them upside down and attach them to the lexan itself because the original windshield was glued to a thin flange we can use these tabs to clamp to the flange and hold the

Windshield in place from the inside without having to drill mounts into the body this means that once we find a glass windshield that fits we can simply revert back to original spec with no changes needed a glance to the inside of the car gives you a better idea of how these clamps

Actually function and this is a nice elegant Solution that’s easily reversible so thanks to Byron next door for the idea I also folded up an aluminum support for the middle of the windshield so that the lexan won’t fold in on itself under heavy load with some extra hands from my buddy

Khalil we got this thing fully riveted into place and the outcome honestly was really good I don’t think most would have any idea that this was a lexan windshield if it weren’t for the aluminum support in the middle but there is one glaring issue and it’s

That I use material that is way too thin I assumed the outward curvature of the plastic would prevent deformation but that was not the case so I had to go all the way back to the beginning and repeat the entire process over again but this time I used considerably thicker

Windshield rated lexan so we didn’t have the same problem and the outcome is much better there’s hardly any deformation when I lean my body onto it to finish the windshield install we’ve got to turn our attention back to the pull cable for our fire suppression system I installed the external cable at

The back of the car in the last episode but a number of you guys pointed out really solid reasons that this isn’t the best place for it so I turned to the FIA rulebook and confirmed that it has to be placed at the base of the a-pillar on

The left hand side it might be a bit atypical but I’ve decided to mount it to the windscreen itself versus drilling holes through the Bodywork and having it sit proud and in the way of getting hit by something it’s right where any official would expect it to be it’s

Largely protected by the roll cage and ultimately I think you guys were right this was the right move but we’re not done tinkering with the fire system just yet a Lifeline representative reached out in the comments of the last video and let me know that unfortunately we can’t Mount

The bottle in a vertical orientation so I’ve had to rearrange everything and mount it to the floor horizontally in the future once we get a passenger seat into this car it should clear underneath the passenger’s legs but for now it’s front and center on the passenger floorboard at least though at

This point it’s not only legal for competition it’s also functional and safe so let’s cross it off the list next we’ve got another delivery from send cut send this time 3 16’s laser cut aluminum to form our seat mounts we designed an FEA tested these in the last

Episode so now it’s just a matter of getting them folded up and then installed in the car normally it’d be smarter on my part to let senka send Bend these parts but with our time crunch I didn’t want to leave anything to chance so we’ve clamped them

In my eight foot break and it took everything we’ve got to get this 3 16 material folded over correctly with the side mounts bolted to the seat we’re ready for installation and we designed these mounts to bolt to the 308 chassis without the need for modification so with the offset base

Plate in place it’s just a matter of getting the seat with the mounts attached into the car and it clears by just millimeters the mounts successfully offset the seat where we needed to be and incline it to the correct angle so that my head clears

The roof so we can call these mounts a success in the same send cut send order we’ve also got some new Wing uprights to replace the current ones which are a bit too flimsy these ones are made from carbon fiber and I don’t mean a carbon fiber laminate over some sort of core

We’re talking about five millimeter thick pure carbon these will give us the support we need not only for the downforce that the wing will develop but to mitigate any side to side forces and to keep the wing from wobbling thankfully it’s just a matter of bolting

Them on as they are otherwise a carbon copy of the parts we had before as far as finish quality goes these things look great and I’m happy that senkatsen sells them with a satin finish but I do want to take the time to make a carbon clarification a lot of the times

When people see matte or satin carbon they tend to call it dry carbon and that’s not what dry carbon is dry carbon is pre-impregnated with resin and has more to do with the production process the Finish is just that it’s just a finish but anyways now as always you guys can make cool

Parts just like I do using send cut send and you can get 15 off using send cutscend.com stanceworks whether it’s made of aluminum or carbon fiber you name it but I want to iterate something else while I’m talking about it because my buddy Jeremy was hanging out at the shop

Over the weekend looking at these cool anodized and pre-bent parts and he was wondering how much does stuff like this actually cost he was assuming that this bracket had to be 50 or 60 bucks considering it’s one-off in custom and I said no something like this is literally

Only twenty dollars even cheaper if you have several of them made if you can kind of reuse your part over and over or if you want to sell them you can run a business on this thing whole point being custom parts from send cut send are not

Nearly as expensive as you might think that they are all of the suspension tabs we just made for John’s Ferrari were like six bucks a piece this stuff is the way to do it your time is worth more than it takes to make this stuff by hand

And it’s not going to come out this nice so build some cool Parts use send cut sent to do it and get that 15 off now let’s turn our attention towards the back right hand side of the car although we’re not talking about the suspension we’re talking about what lurks behind it

In this case the exposed dry sump belt system given that it’s in the wheel well there’s a chance we could throw a rock or other foreign object into it tossing the belt off and killing the engine entirely so I think it’s critical that we make a cover for it only this time

We’re gonna do it the good old-fashioned way I whipped out some misprint posters to use as template material got to cutting folding and taping and eventually wound up with a cover template that we can use to transfer over to actual metal this cover will be five-sided we don’t

Need to seal it off but I want to minimize the chance of any foreign objects killing the engine to keep fabrication simple we’re going to build the whole thing out of sheet aluminum and I’ll use the stop Shear to cut each piece out only two of them will

Need bends on the brake and it will need one auxiliary Mount coming off of the bottom I’m still no Pro when it comes to welding aluminum especially sheet metal on the thinner side but this was an awesome opportunity to keep my skills fresh and improving I wouldn’t call the

Finished result beautiful but it’s effective and given that it’s buried in the wheel well No One’s Gonna See It Anyway if I had a bead roller I’d probably dress it up a bit but this is a part we can’t add anything like dimple dies or screens to or it kind of defeats the

Purpose with the cover installed I believe this is the last major fabrication item on our list we do still have some smaller scale Fab projects to get through though and some of you may remember a number of episodes ago when I built steel adjusters for our front tie rods

I complained that during the welding process these were sparking like crazy and I assumed it had to do with some sort of impurities in the metal because the welds were a bit porous I’ve wanted to redo these ever since and thankfully some smart commenters pointed out the obvious I was having this issue

Because I was welding on top of a magnet so I made some new ones without welding on top of a magnet and this time we’ve got some nice solid parts they’re not the most beautiful thing I’ve ever put together but they’re gonna do the trick and they are significantly

Stronger than the aluminum ones we had in place before that several of you were worried about with these installed it’s another check on our to-do list and we can continue making progress elsewhere Now let’s turn the clock back a full two years to one of the early episodes where I built a transmission mount for the back side of the engine those of you that are really observant will probably have noticed that this hasn’t been installed on the engine ever since

As a result of subtle changes over time the engine has moved ever so slightly forward in this Mount no longer fits so I redesigned it in CAD had a new version Cut and today we’re gonna get it installed I’m not entirely sure that it’s a necessary amount given the fact that

We’ve already dynoed it and made over 800 horsepower without it but I’d rather be safe than sorry especially once we’re trying to make that power hook through sticky tires I got the engine mount welded up and then coated in some black Stila to match the chassis and with that we’re ready to

Get it bolted to the car although it’s pretty clear after bolting everything together that I’m gonna need to place a new McMaster order for some Hardware that’s not so long because redoing old projects is going to be a common theme for this episode I also decided to extensively change where

I’ve got the interior fire pole mounted some of you expressed worry that I’d accidentally pull it if it was mounted next to the shifter and so now it’s mounted down into the side of my seat but we’re not done redoing old projects yet because we’ve removed the dashboard

We no longer have a mount for our 15 button can pad so we need to get it relocated so we can still control the car I chopped up an old splitter Mount that I had sitting in a drawer and modified it to fit the can PAD as a bracket

I’m going to pair that with an aluminum collar clamp that we can use to attach the bracket to the roll cage this one’s got an inch and a half inner diameter which will be perfect for the size of tubing we’ve used I did a little bit of cutting and

Massaging and wound up with 75 percent of the clamp which might sound weird but I’ve decided to mount this thing to the roof bar which is hugged so tight to the roof skin that the clamp can’t completely surround it but with 75 of it it still has plenty of

Clamping force and we’re left with a can pad Mount that won’t be visible from the outside once we have a windshield Banner installed and from the inside it leaves me feeling a bit more like a fighter pilot than ever before and I’m not mad about it

And then there were a bunch of smaller projects I crossed out the list I got the proper plug for the secondary port on our catch can I got Jam nuts installed on all four heim joints on our rear toe links so I don’t have to worry about this stuff

Coming loose and this took way too long but I crawled underneath the car and finally wired in the fuel level sender so that it’ll integrate with our haltech Nexus R5 and we can see how much fuel is in the car slightly more involved was the reinstallation of our fuel filler neck

From the fuel cell to the original location on the sail panel some of the roll cage tubing interferes with the original trajectory of this hard aluminum tube so I had to make some modifications including to the inside of the door so that everything would clear but it works and shuts exactly as it

Should believe it or not the end of the list is nearing and with our Race Tech seat installed now we need to install our new racetech six point harness I went with two inch shoulder belts so that it would play nicely with a Hans device and we’re using wraparound

Connections as they attach to the Belt bar some of you guys asked about the height of the belt bar in the last episode worrying that it might be too high traditionally belts need to run between level and downwards at 20 degrees but things have changed lately and it’s now

Suggested that they run between 10 degrees up and 10 degrees down so we placed the bar accordingly so that once I have the Hans device on they will be perfectly within spec the other connections are pretty simple I’ve got hooks installed in the original mounts for the seat belt on each side of

The car and then the sub belt is attached to the seat frame getting belts installed configured and set to the proper length is a time consuming and often arduous process but after about an hour these things are ready to hold me into place and send me flying around button Willow and

Thankfully the rest of my gear has just shown up so I’ll have to show you guys that stuff in the next step but I have saved the biggest project for last I’ve pulled the suspension off of the car because we need new Springs the h r Springs we have on the car

Currently are a bit too soft for the downforce this thing’s going to develop and we’ve got room for additional spring length so let’s take advantage of both after measuring the available amount of thread on the body of the coilovers it’s abundantly clear we can fit at least an

Inch more on the front and a couple more on the rear so we’ll jot that down and then remove the springs for the next step now this is where things are going to get a bit more technical so buckle in if we want to figure out a spring rate we

Need to aim for a Target wheel rate to know the difference between the spring rate and the wheel rate we need to know the motion ratio of our suspension and given that I designed it in CAD I should have that number already and I do but given that now it all

Exists in Real Steel I want to confirm those numbers so I don’t get anything wrong all right so with the shock back in place with no spring on it we’re going to be able to freely move the suspension through its range of travel so I’m going

To jack up what would be the wheel in this case it’s just the brake rotor and we’re going to measure how much this travels the face of the wheel versus how much the shock itself compresses they’re going to be different numbers because the shock is mounted in board so out

Here is going to move up further than the middle of the control arm which is going to compress the shock less than the actual amount of wheel travel so we’re going to get some baseline information I’m going to take some measurements and we’re going to see exactly what the motion ratio the ratio

Of travel of the shock versus the wheel actually is now it’s worth mentioning that you can figure out your motion ratio by simply measuring the distance from your inboard pickup point to the shock and then to the outer ball joint but given that I built this stuff I want to know for sure

After taking two different dimensions for the wheel travel and two different dimensions for the shot compression I wound up with some numbers for both the front and the rear in the front we’ve got a motion ratio of 0.5 exactly and Outback it’s 0.56 that means roughly for every inch that

The wheel travels up through compression the shock is compressed half as much in turn that means the wheel has a serious leverage advantage on the shock and in turn that means we’re going to need some really stiff Springs and we’re going to talk a lot more about that in

The next episode when we install them but while I ponder over spring rates there’s one other thing I want to do while the Springs are not installed and that is to check the limit of our suspension travel specifically how far we can go before the fenders are blown

Off by the tires when they make contact as it stands things technically clear by a few millimeters while turning inwards but upon turning the wheel outwards it’s abundantly clear that if we were to jump a curb at full lock we would rip a fender clean off the car and given that

These cost thousands of dollars a piece I’m not quite keen on that as you can see we’re extremely Limited at full tuck with how far we can turn in the other direction but if we drop the wheel just a bit we gain enough clearance that we don’t have to worry nearly as much

And thankfully we can limit the amount of up travel the suspension can achieve by putting Bump Stop Packers on the shock absorbers these are finely tunable external shims that will simply limit the travel the suspension can achieve and because the original bump stops are made of foam and

Are further compressible we’re going to eliminate them completely and replace them with a hard composite with these Bump Stop Packers installed it becomes impossible for the suspension to move enough for the tire to make contact with the fender and this gives me a huge peace of mind

To go fast at button Willow you’ve got to hop curbs and while I don’t expect that to happen at full lock now I know that it can so we need to install new h r Springs and we need to align the car there are also a few other small jobs that we need

To take care of all of which will happen in the next episode before we actually head to the track but as it stands we’re finally ready to put the car back down on the ground and take it for its first ever true test drive but I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes

Up here we’re not going to be hammering on the car or getting in a boost this is truly just to make sure we’re ready to load it into the trailer and take it out to button Willow I want to make sure that all the systems are functioning

Properly and that the car feels safe and sound to be inside of before we take it to the desert and really lean on this thing but I hope you guys are along for the ride either way because I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long long time

I should probably wear something other than boots and Shop clothes but cut me a little bit of slack here so let’s answer a handful of questions one yeah it’s loud I should be wearing earplugs but I completely forgot so I’m gonna have to make sure I pack those for the track

For those that are curious getting out of the car is a bit more simple than getting in but I wouldn’t call either of them easy to do so I’m gonna need some practice last but not least the clutch in this thing is an on off switch and is by far

The most difficult I’ve ever driven I know we’re just driving around on surface streets by the shop and it’d be wonderful if there was even so much as a curve nearby to push this thing through but even still it was hard not to grin from ear to ear just finally getting to drive this thing And I know some of you want to see this thing Rip but on the same street as me less than a block away is the Costa Mesa police department and I don’t want to be on their bad side so it’s not going to happen in this episode dude that’s gonna be so sick

All right I know that segment is probably shorter than anybody wanted it to be I drove it around the block about twice and came back there’s no further that I’m going to get out of this right now the car feels nice it feels tight it feels like it’s supposed to I know some

Of you guys are already disappointed I didn’t give it the beans I didn’t hit boost I didn’t Redline it or any of that type of stuff but you saw how packed these streets are those cars everywhere there’s tons of traffic I’m not putting anything at risk I’m saving it for the

Track so if you want to see it driven in Anger you got to come back for the next episode next week because on Friday we’re going to button Willow we’re going to test this thing we’re gonna see what breaks first there’s no chance it goes smoothly it’s going to be a fun episode

As long as I can figure out how the hell I’m gonna film and drive at the same time obviously from the last segment that’s going to prove to be difficult maybe I can rope a friend into going with me but man I am so stoked right now

I feel like I’ve been working towards this for years I know that that was just a simple slow drive in playing people’s eyes but man what a milestone the car feels firm it feels planted it feels like it’s supposed to I feel confident about leaning on it and throwing it into

A turn I’m excited to see what this thing is going to do man what a moment I don’t know if you can see my smile on some of those driving shots but there was definitely a wow this is working type of moment a feeling so man

I’m worked up I’m so stoked come back next week it’s going to be this but times 10. we’re gonna drive this thing on track two and a half years in the making I’ll see you then thanks as always with the support