Complete Build Thread, Daewoo Nubira

I might have to do that.

What I am going to do for sure is build boxes to go under the vents in the hood. This should drain all the rain water to the front edge of the hood and keep it out of my engine electronics.

To take care of the positive underhood pressures, I'm going to build a flap valve in the bottom of this box that will open whenever the car is going fast enough to create positive pressure differentials on the bottom of the hood.

Oh, and I'm going to paint it. This design:

Just make the red part a dark silver and make the yellow part midnight black.

Back in Korea update:

My friend that I let borrow the car filled it with the delightful smell of fresh cigarette. Mmmmm ... I will pay him back by filling his house with the awesome sound of my bitching.

Dropped in some seats from a Daewoo Leganza since the originals were pretty busted up and one had broken a mount. I'm thinking of performing a foamectomy, for $40 for the pair, why not?

The guys at the first junkyard I tried were the rudest pricks I've ever had the displeasure to deal with. I found the car "we don't have," I set up the parts guy to grab it, I hauled it back, I chased down the missing clerk, I gave instructions to the stoned and blank faced parts monkey. Not going back, even if the prices were good.

The engine is still running strong, although I think there might be a O2 sensor or TB sensor going bad. It's about as fast as the Hyundai Veloster Turbo I drove in the US, so that's good. The handling is still better than any street car I've ever driven.

I need new tires. I need to fix the new rust poking through the other shock tower. Evidently Nubiras rust in the rear shock towers because this is the second one I'm going to replace in 18 months. I need to fix the rust in the kick panel on the driver's side. I hate rust.

After that, I'm gonna get a paint job. I changed my mind again and I think I will go with a green body and flat black hood, roof and trunk.

Some blue and grey vinyl tears as well?

I love this project, btw.

In reply to Rxbalt:

Sort of camo by accident?

I'm surprised about the rust - it's not like there's road salt to worry about in South Korea.

They use a ton in my neck of the woods.

A few pages back i mentioned a 0-60 times of 12.9seconds with the mighty 1.5. Redid the test for the first time since the 2.0 swap and ... drumroll please ...

7.7 seconds.

Not bad considering i need two upshifts to hit 100 kph.

Update time ...

I got my first real chance to test the car after adjusting the rear roll centers down. I also went with a slightly harder compound street tire in the back. It appears my little Daewoo is no longer capable of understeer, which is very exciting.

After that, I went to a racing shop and asked them to do 300 bucks worth of rust repair on the rear strut tower. I wandered off and when I returned, the gentleman showed me not only a beautifully welded and very strong rust repair but informed me that, for 250 bucks total, he'd thrown in a complimentary hand fabricated strut tower brace. I think I'll be returning to this particular establishment ...

Random cool pictures:

Grad school has pretty much killed my race car budget, but the Daewoo of Death did get the recent opportunity to star in a public safety announcement about seat belts.

http://prezi.com/yngi7vzaseqw/untitled-prezi/

I started out reading and thinking, what? Daewoo? What?

Then later... Daewoooo!

And lo, as my MA program did subside, the restlessness of my spirit did rise high into my breast. Verily, I poured out these energies on the long neglected Daewoo of Death and saw that it was good.

A couple of third grade kids I teach gave me good luck "tattoos" before I got started.

With that out of the way, it was time to get the mounts built for my oil cooler and start work on an aero box to add to the racing hood my middle school kids built two years ago.

Here's my buddy Chris showing off the mounts we made. Those pieces started life as cabinet brackets, but with a little rubber stripping designed for a garden application, some self tapping screws and a lot of PVC tape, we've got some strong, no rub mounts for the delicate oil cooler.

Here's one mounted between the AC condenser and the bumper. Right now the oil cooler only gets direct air over about half of its surface area, but that problem will go away when I make this thing full on race car. The bumper beam is not long for this world and there's gonna be a hole in the bumper plastic right where this mounts.

Next, I moved on to the rusty, dented spare trunk I had in my linen closet. I made some templates out of cardboard, traced them on the trunk with spray paint and went to town. It's kind of hard to explain right now, but these pieces will be part of an aero box on the underside of the hood. They will open valves when the air pressure gets higher under the hood than above it and thus improve both cooling and aero-lift when I'm driving hard.

It does all this right now, of course, but without the valve. This means my hood isn't terribly weather proof at the moment. It also means I'm worried the oil cooler will work too well when I'm putzing and the car will never get up to temp. With the hood "closed" at lower speeds, it should warm up a little quicker.

And yes, I am doing all this in a public parking garage. It's not my fault they left electrical outlets all over the place.

And thus it came to pass that the oil cooler was mounted and the hood thing begun. Fear ye not, for I shall finish the hood thingy upon the morrow.

Best build on here...

You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.

Thanks for the encouragement, my esteemed colleagues.

Good news and bad news.

Bad news first: Korea has a really weird process for safety inspecting a car. Basically anything pertaining to the body or engine (and the clutch?!?!) has to be stock. No such checks for the brakes, suspension or chassis. As long as those things function, they don't care what mods you do. Do you want a 19 inch lift kit on your Sephia held on with super glue and and a decade's accumulated rust? No problem. Do you want a header or even a larger catalyst? DEATH UNTO THEE, VILE SINNER! This causes me more than a little worry about the whole swapped-a-much-larger-and-more-powerful-motor-into-it thing.

Other bad news. The oil cooler I designed all those cool garden sourced mounts for sucks. Starting over from scratch, here.

Only one side of the parking brake works. I have to fix this to finish the safety check, along with getting a longer tip on the OEM muffler. No, I'm not making that last part up.

Good news, the safety inspector was fooled by my black paint and obstructive mount placement and didn't notice the motorswap. I'm out of the woods here.

Other good news, the tabs on the aero box are closer to square than I thought they would. This should be a pretty clean install.

I don't have time to get to this stuff between now and the 30th, when I have to redo the inspection so I'm gonna be lame and have a mechanic do it. Shame ~

Because of school and the work situation (company is in trouble), I'm being pretty cautious with money right now. However, this need not stop me from making stuff.

This last week I've been using a rusty old trunk, cardboard templates, a rivet gun and my angle grinder to make this!

What's left of my trunk: I'm thinking of installing it at least once more, just for the looks.

The raw materials.

I don't believe in wasting cutting wheels. Those puppies are like 50 cents a pop.

With all the tabs bent and a few rivets thrown in.

See above.

Installed, seen from under the hood.

Installed, as seen from above.

Here's what it looked like before.

Now I just need to find something suitable to make the flap valves out of.

Update time.

The first thing on my plate has been to beat back the ever advancing tide of rust. The three big ones were both back shock towers (both cut out and replaced) and the sill. This sill is the last chunk of rust on this car I care about. There's one more on one of the front fenders, but I'm going to avoid giving a E36 M3 about that particular fender by going to the junkyard, buying spares and modifying them for improved cooling and aerodynamics. More on that later.

So, without further ado, the adventures in sill repair.

First, I took a wire brush to this little spot of rust and discovered a collection of absolute horrors. The sill was packed with salt and rust - there must have been five pounds of loose crap I pulled out. Someone's idea of a "repair" in the past had evidently been to stuff the sill with cardboard and then slather a bunch of bondo OVER the rust. Once I got through the bondo I found four separate holes completely rusted through and the cancer was getting close to affecting the structural parts of the unibody.

So I panicked. I pulled out the cutting wheels and sliced off everything that looked even slightly suspicious. I was in that fugue state of mind where you are somehow both aware and unwilling to admit that you should probably not be cutting the bodywork off your daily driver with an angle grinder.

I spent the next couple of days driving around town with enormous grinder-holes in the sill, collecting necessary tools and materials, doing grad school stuff and reading Joey M's 32 Datsun build thread for inspiration. I also used a pressure washer to clean out any remaining gunk I couldn't get with my fingers.

After several unsuccessful trips to used furniture stores, apartment complex trash heaps and the construction zone around a local middle school, I finally stumbled upon a recycling center that looked promising. I talked to the owners and after a little finagling they agreed to let me poke around their scrap piles. There, glimmering among the decaying refrigerators and toxic sludge puddles, was a glorious heated floor panel. It was perfectly flat, made of stainless steel roughly the same gauge as Daewoo body panels and mine for the princely sum of $1.78.

I took it home, cut it into strips and removed all the electrical/foam/thermal gubbins. With the materials ready I once more went into my apartment's underground parking garage, pulled out my collection of hammers, fired up the drill and prepared the rivet gun.

Basically I used the original body structure to provide a shape and then drilled holes into the good metal surrounding the voids I'd cut out. I then riveted the patch panel into place along the top edge, bent the patch around the remaining structure and then riveted it onto the bottom of the sill. After about three hours of grinding oil, sand and steel dust into my armpits, the whole thing looked suspiciously like a healthy body panel.

Granted, the color isn't an exact match (gold patch, white car) and the panel doesn't perfectly blend with the original sheetmetal, but I think with a little bit of correctly applied bondo and a respray (which the car badly needs anyway), it will look pretty respectable. This is what it looks like now, sans bondo and respray.

In less depressing news, oil cooler!

Whoa that oil cooler's huge, what model is that?

Be sure that those steel-braided lines aren't rubbing on anything BTW, they're a danger to themselves AND others if they touch things. If you're not sure or it looks a little close anywhere, put grommets on it just in case. You might want to wrap those zip ties thick in electrical tape where they touch the lines.

I can't read Chinese so we'll just call it the Generico 1000. It's a 1.5 liter cooler. I'm determined this Daewoo will be my first ever track car without cooling problems - and I really plan to hammer on this thing in the coming years.

Thanks for the tip. I'll check everything again.

What does the GRM braintrust think of this for a paint scheme? They are pretty much the only factory Daewoo racing colors I can find.

Looks good. Never thought I'd see the Daewoo "jock strap" displayed so proudly

I might have to leave off the boulder holder.

Donk wheels!

I didn't weigh them in any way more scientific than lifting the new 17 with one hand and the old 15 in the other, but they appear to be about the same mass. So that's good. They're also able to support a 225/45/17 tires, which is about all my Daewoo will fit (until I flare it. You wouldn't really flare a Daewoo, would you? Yes, yes I would). It's actually rubbing a little bit right now, with the 215/45/17s. They're a little bit taller than the 15 inch package I had before, so the gearing got effectively taller. This, honestly, is probably a good thing. The 2.0 DOHC is not very powerful above 5500 rpm and with small wheels and the 4.10 gears out of a 1.5L Nubira, it wasn't a very good combination once you got over about 70 mph. It's at least a little better now.

Box flare tiem?