BUILD-OFF CHALLENGE: MichiganMat Options

[MichiganMat]

Hey er'body, Im MichiganMat from San Jose and Im building a 914.

Backstory:
This summer I had the pleasure of picking up a '75 914 chassis here in San Jose for a mere $300.
It came with with virtually nothing:
no driveline, no interior, no pedals, etc. Stripped, but solid, with minimal overhead and cost.
I've been building 911s for many years now and had an extra set of wheels and 911 front struts in my shed, so I thought hey, lets do this.
My brother and I are just finishing up putting an STi motor into our '67 912 too, so with that project wrapping up Im ready to jump into another.


The Plan:
Well, I got the car for cheap, and I've already got a perfectly good '75 911S to daily/rally/etc with, so the plan is to build a stripped down 914 racer for AX and track fun.
The car will be getting:
- Tangerine Racing rollcage, tied to 8pts, with nascar door-bars
- Rennspeed fiberglass body (fenders f&r, hood, trunk, and both bumpers)
- Mad Dog chassis reinforcement kit and hell-hole repair
- Resto-Design floorpans, seat areas dropped by 2", with custom tunnel
- Tilton pedals
- 5 lug conversion
- 16x7 Fuchs all the way around with 2nd option of 15x7ATE's with canti slicks
- /likely/ wrx drivetrain, but Im exploring my options...


Where sits today:
I picked up the car in May and I've since then I've put it on a home-built rotisserie, cut the pans, tunnel, trunk, headlight buckets, and front fenders out of it, and fixed the hell-hole area.
The pans were totally rotted, the battery tray was nonexistent, the fenders on all 4 corners had damage. Pretty easy to make the decision to start fresh, haha.
Today, most of the chassis kit is installed but I can't finish it until the roll-cage is put in. Tangerine is almost done with the cage so it'll be another week or so until I see it.
In the meantime, the plan is to clean up the wheel-wells, fix the rust in the longs, put in the trunk cross-sections, and primer the reinforcements.
Then I'll get to work on the tunnel, mod'ing the pans, installing the fiberglass, etc.


Anyways, hello, nice to meet you guys, and Im looking forward to the challenge!

[MichiganMat]

Time for an update!

Been busy with a few things:
• It drives! Took it around the block just to shake it down a bit, car feels great. Still needs a windshield, heh.
• Found out why it was running so rich, I hadn't plumbed the bypass valve correctly. Plumbed it to the intake and *boom* no more super-rich exhaust.
• Added number meatballs to the doors for that racer effect
• Found out the water pump is leaking badly, so that will need to replaced ASAP.
• Been working on the digital dash via RaceCapture. This is where the bulk of my time has been spent.

A bit more about the RaceCapture: Bought a used RaceCapture Track module from eBay and it came with a bad wifi module. $10 and an hour with a soldering iron and a new wifi module is installed and the Racecapture works as expected.

Next problem: Older Subaru ECUs don't speak CAN bus. They speak a Subaru-only message format called SSM. This means that I can't just plug the RaceCapture into the OBD2 port and get signals. There is, however, a project out there which uses an Arduino to translate SSM to CAN:

https://github.com/rpkish/Subduino-SSM

I've started building one of these and I've made pretty good progress. Im able to send test signals from the Arduino to the RaceCapture and have the data appear on the tablet dash. The next step is to wire up the SSM side and plug into the ECU.

Otherwise, we've got a huge backyard remodel going on and my garage is completely stuffed with BBQ and firepit equipment so I haven't had any space to work.

SSM to CAN video is here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/qNpLpvHHIXg