Hello, Let me first off say that I like racing cars, but I love building cars. I am building one of my civics right now as track only. This is my first real track car I have built with the rest being more for the street with race duties. I am interested in using this for track days and some autox, possibly time attacks. I work on cars for a living so working on this is not a problem all the way down to nothing, which is how it sits now. Anyways, for you race prepped guys, what do you do with the undercoating under the car? Do you remove it? I was at least going to clean it up or possibly spray some thinner coating under it after removing, if not try and remove it entirely. I have a very close attention to detail and want to build this car with nothing overlooked. Also, If anyone has a link to a road racing build journal or something a long those lines I would greatly appreciate it. I just have a lot of questions on chassis prep among other things that wouldnt make sense to post 50 different questions or make one huge post. Thanks again for your help.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Go-Ahead...86005

This book was written by an SCCA racer, who is on this forum. It has a good build guide and is aimed more to wheel to wheel, but still fully applies.

 

If you can afford to have the car hot-tanked that is really the best way to go to get all the seam filler and undercoating off.

I used a wire wheel. It takes forever, makes a huge mess and gets little pointy wires stuck in your clothes and skin. Only did the interior, front wheel wells and engine bay to the foot-wells and forgot the rest. Manually removing ALL of it was just not worth the hassle.

There are a lot of build tips here in the archives. Search and you'll find most of them.

 

How hard is it to get to min. weight on that car? With my first Prelude build, I stripped it down quite a bit then put it on the scales. Doh! I found that I was waaaaay to lite. With my recent build, I kept everything that I could on in the rear of the car.

If you want to take the undercoating off and don't want to do the hot-tank route, do you possibly have access to a chasis rotisserie?


(Thanks Evan! )

 

I am not really going for any racing class, just track days for the most part to have fun, so I am not going for really a minimun weight, just as low as safely possible. Like I said I want no detail overlooked on this car, I actually didint mind scraping all the interior sound deadening off, but the underside of the car is what I am talking about. Thanks for all the help so far guys.