Kadettenclub!

pres589 (djronnebaum) said:

The 1.8 turbo out of the Sunbird?

Nein... I am building a 1.1L Opel engine, which is the stock pushrod lump in these early Kadetts. The "Brazilian" moniker comes from the fact that we're using Mini 1.6L Tritec pistons & rods in these, which happen to fit very well with just a slight overbore of the block and a reduction in rod journal diameter on the crank. The Tritec engine was built in Brazil for the early 2000s Mini R50/R53, so it became known as "giving it a Brazilian" when installing these pistons & rods.

That seems much less straight forward!  Interesting project.  And very cool what you're doing to mix old and new tech on this car.

Back in August we were getting ready for more racing with the Opile (the gray Lemons car featured in this thread) when Alex found a killer deal on a small single axle aluminum tilt-bed trailer on Craigslist not too far from us. So step 1 in our first race of 2020 was to procure this "new" trailer. Our box truck car hauler was still broken at this point and the other small trailer had been stolen out of our shop parking lot. Even with a functional box truck, a small car trailer is a great thing to have around. We couldn't lose.

So... now we have trailer. It was clearly homemade and has not much torsional rigidity. But that doesn't seem to matter much. It has steel C-channels for the main frame, with steel crossmembers and leaf springs. Aluminum ramps from moving trucks were used as decking and allegedly they can come out. 

Loading is easy! The tongue pivots under the deck. Take the pin out and place chocks behind the rear wheels. Reverse the tow vehicle until the deck tilts and preloads the trailer tires against the chocks. Then drive car slowly up ramps. If it starts tilting before rear tires are on, then reverse the tow vehicle again to add preload. With a bit of practice it's a one man operation. The Opile was temporarily broken at this time, so we test loaded Alex's Chevy Bolt EV which is much more weight than we'd ever normally put on this thing, and it was fine (3,500 lb vs. about 1,700 for a Kadett). Getting rid of the need for ramps is a real luxury and a novelty.

Wheels are 14.5” mobile home spec that had some older dryrotted tires. I picked up some Homasters from Amazon. "Homaster V" is the actual brand name, can't make this stuff up. Brand new trailer tires mounted on rims for about $200 shipped. The Opile fits quite well and again, the lack of ramps is amazing. Best few hundred bucks we ever spent.

pres589 (djronnebaum) said:

That seems much less straight forward!  Interesting project.  And very cool what you're doing to mix old and new tech on this car.

Thanks! Alex has been the driving force behind the creative mixing of parts and the hard labor to pull this off; my roles are engineering consultant, historian, and builder of "Brazilian #2" in that order.

If you look back at pg. 3 of this thread you'll see some details from Alex's initial Brazilian build. I'll be posting quite a bit more here too - I have my bottom end together on the 2nd engine now.

Here's the side by side of original Opel 1.1L (75mm bore) vs. Mini Tritec 1.6L (77mm bore). The big deal is the huge reduction in reciprocating mass, plus longer rods and shorter skirts. And modern rings, and modern materials...etc etc!

Nice, finding a suitable trailer is good.

The tilting bed is a great idea when it is executed in a way that works. My old tilting trailer had the loading deck too high up, and too large wheels, so loading anything but a rally height car or off roader without ramps was pretty much impossible.

The guy I sold it too is looking into all the modifications I never got around too, including looking at smaller wheels.

My dream is one of those trailers that hydraulically lay the platform almost flat on the ground though. So cool!

Gustaf

therealpinto said:

Nice, finding a suitable trailer is good.

The tilting bed is a great idea when it is executed in a way that works. My old tilting trailer had the loading deck too high up, and too large wheels, so loading anything but a rally height car or off roader without ramps was pretty much impossible.

The guy I sold it too is looking into all the modifications I never got around too, including looking at smaller wheels.

My dream is one of those trailers that hydraulically lay the platform almost flat on the ground though. So cool!

Gustaf

Cheers, yeah this is the best small trailer any of us have had the pleasure of buying off of craigslist. Our previous one had a fixed deck and it was too tall, having been made from a jet ski trailer. This tilting one is just right, not too low but also just low enough that a sporty car doesn't scrape anywhere on the way up or down. We need to make a few small improvements but it's been great so far. The mobile home wheels & tires were a decent choice - they are cheap and have a high load limit. We're storing them indoors for security but also that should help them last longer.

With Lemons racing canceled for the rest of the year, what better to do than drink a coffee porter and write about the one race we did get to run in 2020?

First of all it was amazing to be able to race at all this year. Jay and Nick and the rest of the Lemons crew did an amazing job of assessing risk, adjusting activities, and putting the right level of health and safety protocol in place to allow racing to happen, without killing the fun completely. Even with the COVID changes it was much more fun than not racing for the weekend!

Second of all, our E36 Camper was down for the count with a blown-up 5.3L V8, so the team re-centered around the Opile and the lure of Class C victory. The one race we were able to do was Button Turrible in late September at Buttonwillow, essentially our home track. I will let Alex go through the details of everything he did to the car to prepare, but there were a lot of upgrades once again, and I don't remember all the ins & outs. A lot of what-have-yous. A lot of strands in old Duder's head...

The major activity leading up to the race centered around building a slightly beefier 4-speed, because the standard Kadett B trans is so tiny and fragile. Alex was able to get his hands on Kadett C gearbox internals, including shafts, gears, & bearings, so he modified a spare B case and built up a hybrid 'box that is outline interchangeable with the standard one. This involved tricky boring operations on the milling machine and lots of hopes & dreams.

Alex also cleaned up the interior quite nicely, painting the roll cage and blacking out the internal door panels. He wired up a push to talk radio button on the steering wheel using the airbag clockspring contacts in the Miata steering column - clever! He also made a new aluminum undertray out of 3003 sheet and some radiator baffles. This decreased fan duty cycle and got the running temps down even in LA traffic. I'm not sure if Alex has gone into the whole digital ignition saga in this thread or not yet, but suffice it to say that the car is now running MegaJolt programmable distributorless ignition and he had fun tuning it. There was that broken crankshaft and subsequent engine rebuild... but we will overlook that for now! We also added the first Volvo 240 part to this car, a brake master cylinder reservoir that I donated to the cause. The MC itself is not 240 though; it's now from a BMW 7 series to better match the Miata front calipers in the same form factor as the original Opel ATE master. I think that about covers the pre-race upgrades.

Our buddy and teammate Nathan decided to join in the Opile racing fun this time, since the "main car" wasn't an option. He was a founding member of our team but an Opel Noob so we made sure he got plenty of seat time during the Friday test session before the race. Just before the race Alex finished prep and reinstalled the big Kirkey aluminum racing seat, removed the passenger seat, relocated the battery to the trunk, and got some fresh new drink nipples - because we suck from a common hose, with our drinks bottle living inside the cool suit cooler with the ice water. It would be more efficient to just drink the cool suit water, but we haven't had to stoop quite that low yet.

My wife Michele rejoined as 4th driver again to round out the team. Last time she had problems reaching 3rd gear even with the seat all the way forward, so we experimented with foam back rests to get her pushed up a bit. The shifter location is too far forward on this car, objectively, and that's on the list of future upgrades to move it rearward a bit. The main message leading up to the race was: be gentle on the transmission, and we are doing 4 hour stints again.

Oh, I can't forget the 1,1 sticker...

Here we have the big cool suit / drinks cooler and Kirkey seat.

Paddock setup for the weekend, spacing pit spots out between teams more due to Covid.

Michele gets suited up and strapped in for the test session.

After some amount of time on the track on Friday, testing before the race, Michele reported that it was tough to shift into 4th. Not increased effort at the shifter, but like it just couldn't find 4th and wouldn't engage no matter what. She was being nice and gentle too. This was a problem. Then Nathan jumped in the car and had lots of clutch slip, as if the trans was covered in oil! So we brought him in and pulled the trans. Turns out the new "hybrid" Kadett B/C gearbox was fundamentally OK but the input shaft retainer / seal retainer had come loose due to a snap ring not being fully seated in its groove. Gear oil came out, and soaked the clutch disc. Here's Nathan with the baby 4-speed on the picnic table after we pulled it, the first of what would turn out to be several times during the weekend. We decided to not use the oily disc but swapped to an NOS ancient disc of unknown provenance. This would prove to be our undoing.

We got the trans back together, and I took the car out for a drive on Main Drain Road (just off the scenic Lerdo Highway!) and reported all was well.

On Saturday morning I took the first stint and settled into a car that was much faster than the last time I drove it on a track, which was also at Buttonwillow exactly one year earlier. With the Brazilian bottom end it's revvy and zingy, and feels like a real car with power pulling all the way to redline. Weight is still sub-2k lb, power is just below 100 bhp at the flywheel. So it's not exactly fast but it is a respectable Class C car now instead of just being a slow car that looks cool like it was before. The NA Miata 1.6 brakes and front spindles really help with steering feel and braking power. The Opel is well balanced now with no real hint of the terminal understeer it had before.

Less than an hour through my 4-hour stint I noticed the trans starting to make noise going into 4th, as if the synchros were old and worn. Except they weren't; the hybrid Kadett B/C trans had brandy-new syncros in it actually. I had to shift veeerrry lightly and gingerly to get it into 4th without noise, and rev match carefully. At some point it just didn't want to go anymore at all, similar to what Michele felt on Friday. I pulled in for a brief inspection by the team but nothing was obviously hanging off the car so we kept going and I had a 3-speed now. That didn't slow me down much, in fact I was able to improve my laptimes because I wasn't nursing it into 4th and not losing time during those 3-4 upshifts that now didn't need to happen. I got into a few good battles with other semi-decent cars and had a blast. We could actually pass other cars now despite the tiny 1136 engine being smaller than just about everything else out there except for the 2 Geo Metros. We were much faster than one Metro but slower than the other (which was very well driven). Through the twisty bits I was absolutely hanging with Miatas and other much more modern small nimble cars. They would mostly still pull away from me on the straights, but not too drastically, and with some late braking I could catch back up again. It felt like we were in the hunt for Class C now.

My wife Michele got in the car for the 2nd (and last) stint on Saturday and generally had a great time too. There were a few false black flags where the corner workers weren't being super clear about which car was at fault, so she came in without needing to, finding out they weren't for her after all. This is better than getting a black flag and ignoring it though! She started out with 3 speeds as I had, but then found that the 2-3 upshifts were getting difficult and crunchy after a while. Some experimentation proved that the car could do the entire lap in 3rd, since we were only using 2nd in the tightest turn. So without shifting to worry about she got to focus on race craft, passing other cars, being passed, and generally having fun. Literally no complaints apart from the transmission and maybe some sort of minor issue with the cool suit cooler.

The radios were only working one way - from car to pits was fine, but absolutely no signal from pits back to car. So during my stint I suggested that the team make an old fashioned pit board and wave it at me whenever they wanted to. That worked out better than expected - a big piece of cardboard with masking tape writing works pretty well for communicating time and simple instructions.

After the track went cold for the night I investigated the radio system and found a terrible connection in the car harness socket, where the driver jacks in with a 1/4" dongus. The crappy strain relief we had done in years past had finally given up the ghost and subsequently our headphone audio signal wire broke, hence no sound in the driver's ears. That was an easy fix.

We decided as a team that it would be best to swap back to our standard, slightly worn-out Kadett B transmission which had 4 functional gears. Crucially we left the unknown non-oily clutch disc in the car though (mistake!). We did the trans swap in about 90 minutes of easy wrenching, from first bolt loosened to last bolt tightened. Pretty good, but we would get more practice...

Lemons Nick snapped this pic below as the sun was setting over the Central Valley. Alex took the car out for dinner at a local taco truck and said everything felt great.

On Sunday, we started in 25th position overall I think, and maybe 3rd or 4th in Class C. Nathan took the morning stint and was flying, but before long a massive noise happened from the transmission area. Metal clanging sounds ensued. I don't remember if he limped back to the paddock or had to come in on the hook, but at any rate we jumped into action and had the car up on jackstands and parts flying off very quickly. It turns out the unknown NOS clutch disc had delaminated, sending bits of itself everywhere. I think most of the rivets failed, the ones that keep the layers of steel and friction material together, IIRC. So we sprayed the oily clutch disc (pulled on Friday) with brake cleaner and threw it back in. Our swap time was down to about 35 minutes, with that entire lap (including going around the track once) taking 52 minutes. That factors in the slow drive back to the pits, plus the before & after work involved with getting the car in the air and getting the driver out & back in. No photos because we were scrambling and it looked like every other transmission swap we'd done that weekend.

We were now down in about 35th place overall. But Nathan managed to improve on my fastest lap by 5 or 6 seconds, and got us back up to 30th. Then Alex took the final stint, putting in the fastest lap of our weekend at 2:43.3 (this is BW Clockwise #1 configuration which uses the Star Mazda turn). In the Class C battle Alex managed to pass the Jeep Grand Cherokee and a Dodge Caliber to gain positions back, then the Cybertruck of team CYBERberkeley'D, which was a convincing copy made out of a 1st-gen Ford Ranger and some flat sheetmetal. Those guys were pitted next to us. A few of them were first-time racers and they had a great approach and attitude towards the whole thing. We had no further issues with the Opel for the rest of the race. The Victory In Sight team, with a 1st-gen Honda Insight that had its hybrid system removed (seen here) walked away with Class C victory with 313 laps overall and a fastest lap of 2:29.4. The Flaming A-Holes had a Jaguar X-Type that broke on Sunday, but they had turned enough laps to hold on to 2nd place in C, with 301 and a best of 2:24.5. Our major competition, believe it or not, was the Studebaker Avanti. We don't know these guys - but we should get to know them. Their car is rad, and they turned 297 laps with a best of 2:34.0 which is only 3/10ths faster than the Opile! So weird that these cars were such a close match; good times. We would have been very close to them in overall laps too if not for the Sunday trans pull & clutch swap. The Opile finished 4th in Class C, and 23rd overall.

Avanti and Opile...

I wrote up this summary for our Instagram account:

Last weekend’s Button Turrible race was a resounding success for Team Opile - despite 3 transmission-out services at the track. First of all, we got to go racing, in 2020. Huge thanks to everyone @24hoursoflemons management for making this possible. We turned 283 laps during the race and got to pretend things were semi-normal, and hang out (at a distance) with old buddies like @eyesoreracing , @driveslikeagirl, @meeks2437 drinking beer, having a BBQ, and talking trash about each other’s crapcans as we cobbled them back together each night. Our buddy Luke ran the race solo in his Volvo 245 showing us all how to do chilled out zen racing, and he got an award for the effort. We found a stray dog and helped it find a new home. Met new friends on the @cyberfukd team pitted next door. Got to battle on track with @bernaldadsracing and Hella E36 M3ty and many others. Even though our little 1.1L got left in the dust on the straights it was fun hanging with faster cars in the turns. Managed to pass the Dodge Caliber, Jeep Grand Tiki Bar, and the Cybertruck in the standings to finish 4th in class C, and 23rd overall in the 1967 Kadett. Here’s to more fun to come for the Opile!

Here's the official Lemons wrap-up video for the race.

Some on track action, battling with a Buick Skyhawk out of the Star Mazda turn and into the esses.

More post-race notes.

From Alex:

Well, there it is.  History has overtaken us once again, all our hard work is over and the "results" speak for themselves.  Once again I would like to thank everyone for pulling together during the challenging moments and an extra thanks to Nathan and his El Dorado bag of tricks that contained everything from 110 power, hamburgers, to shoe goo.  Seriously, the Opile would have been a goner without all that extra stock and fab wrench skills.

So anyhow, the funny thing is the old transmission that I rebuilt way back when I got the car soldiers on.  It now has 3 races on it plus a few thousand street miles and it pretty much behaves the same way as when I put it together the first time.  Clearly I should have never looked that gift horse in the mouth.  Anyhow, my current strategy will be to re-re-rebuild the other transmission, add the cool long shifter, and start driving on it.  If I can get it to be happy then we will have two nice trannies and a shifter that’s near the driver to boot.  I’m also going to machine the flywheel and get a new clutch for obvious reasons.  I think there is a slightly larger clutch option (180mm vs current 170mm) that I’ll try and get

The really good news is how little damage the car took in any other way.  Engine is the same friendly little guy we started with and shows no signs of giving up.  Same oil pressure and overall manners now as ever.  Really a miracle if you ask me considering the abuse we all gave it.  The rear axle and brakes are the same from what I can tell.  I am replacing both outer axle bearings since I detected a bit of slop but they aren’t really bad.  We are still running the SAME tires that come with the car.  They have 4 races on them plus all the street miles I have done and from the looks of them they should be able to give us two more races.  That’s flat out insane.  Maybe I could buy some new ones just due to the age of the rubber?

Thanks again for joining up and let’s see if I have the time to do Sonoma.  So far I’m still happy with the Opile and it’s perfect crappyness.

From my response:

The Opile is truly a miracle of modern Lemons science. Thanks for letting us be involved again! It was a blast to drive even without the use of 4th gear.

I dug through the race results from 2019 and 2020 Buttonwillow, and the fastest lap was 7 seconds faster this year. Amazing! Not sure who set the fast lap last year but we think it might have been Nate. He was noticeably bummed not to be involved this time. I'd say keep him in mind for Sonoma if that works out and if a driver spot needs to be filled.

Michele remembers her own fastest lap and my fastest lap both being about 20 seconds slower last year vs. this year. That means that we both somehow found many seconds in our driving techniques on top of the car's improvements.

 And from Nathan:

I downloaded our lap data from the race and created some lap time plots and identified the stops.  It's impressive how little impact running a 3 speed vs a 4 speed had on lap times.  You can see Chris actually had his best lap times during the second half of his stint when he was operating in 3 speed mode and Michele's best lap time was only 3 seconds off his pace.

Both of Michele's false black flag stops could have been prevented if we had functional 2 way radio communication and the extra pit stop for water and ice could have been prevented if we had filled up more ice and had a drinking straw that didn't curl up in the bottle.  The stop to replace the clutch disk could have been prevented if I didn't blow up the clutch :)

Excellent wrie-up!

Great write-up , 

When my friend was drag racing a Fiat 600 with a big VW motor and stock Fiat 600 trans they got down to 20 minutes replacing the blown up Fiat transaxle , which happened to often !

We need to find you more Opel transmissions.....

californiamilleghia said:

We need to find you more Opel transmissions.....

I have 2 but they are in New Hampshire...

preach said:

californiamilleghia said:

We need to find you more Opel transmissions.....

I have 2 but they are in New Hampshire...

put them in Hatchs carry on luggage next time he comes out here.....

He will never notice !

Thank you guys! More to come.

20 minutes to change a transaxle is seriously impressive, especially in the back of a tiny Fiat. Hopefully we don't need to keep practicing our hot transmission swaps and improve on our time, but it's a distinct possibility.

We have done a bunch of research on creative trans swap upgrade options and have narrowed it down to maybe 3 main contenders, if we ever need to go there.

Right now I think we have 3 or 4 of the Opel 4-speeds in stock, including the one in my car and the one in the race car. But it's easy to lose count of this stuff.

One step closer to being able join you guys in working on my 1.1 car.  (Gotta get the 1.9 car on the road) breaking it in this week !  Looking forward to starting my own "Brazilian" journey. 

In reply to dutch32 :

Nice!

Purdy!

I must say that I'm really impressed of the work you have put into that engine! Most wouldn't hesitate more than a second before throwing it out! :) Here on the other side of the pond, where CIH engines are common, an upgrade to a 1900 at the least is just a couple of hours work and then you start out with 90hp. If one finds a 2.4 and give it the same amount of work you have done it would probably put out around 220hp and make for at pretty damn fast little car :)

I've had three cars with the 1.2S engine, broke two of them. One from running without oil, and the other from over revving. The third actually got a milled, port matched 1100 head and a mix of jet's from the 1100 and 1200 carbs. If I remeber correctly I had about 11.5:1 in compression, it gave the car a huge bump in driveability! Atleast 5 hp! :D

The first engine I broke was actually in this car (A later model Kadett, sold as a Chevette in the states)

Now it's getting an engine three times that size, with double the amount of cylinders. And a lot more stuff as well.. For example a badge from another Kadett that also had an engine from the 1,1/1,2 family! A Kadett A (aka shoebox) SUPER! That one only had 1.0l displacement ;)

In reply to Cassius :

Cool car! Which V8 are you running in there? It's hard to tell from the photo. Thanks for the kind words about the projects.

We never got the Kadett C here in the States exactly. The American market Chevette was quite a bit different (not to mention much uglier) although it was related and on the global T-car platform. There was also a later "Buick Opel by Isuzu" monstrosity sold here, a Japanese-made Isuzu Gemini which again was based on the Kadett C. But the "proper" Kadett C is a pretty car and I wish we had them here to play with as well.

It's weird, we got later Kadett variants here in the States long after the Opel brand was no longer sold. The Isuzu I-Mark and Chevrolet / Geo Spectrum was sorta based on the Kadett D I think. Then the Pontiac Le Mans was a Daewoo-assembled version of the Kadett E. Then skip two generations, and the Astra H was sold here as the Saturn Astra, then we got two generations of the Buick Verano / Chevy Cruze (based on Astra J & K).

So in a weird way it came full circle, since the original Opel Kadett A and B were sold in the US by the Buick dealer network.

It's a 3.7l 230hp unit (for registration purposes). It has much shorter stroke than the 4.2's. With the ITB's (old M3 E46 stuff), headers (180 degree/crossover type), and the drysump in order to get the engine as low as absolutly possible it should make for a fun ride :)

A set of cams later on should put well past 300bhp which should be more than enough considering the weight of the car :) But I'd be lying if I said I hadn't cursed myself for going this route.. I also opted for cutting as little as possible out of the car so the engine bay is almost untouched by the grinder. That makes for Huge issues concerning space for headers, dry sump, alternator and all the berkeleying hoses that come with it! :D

Yeah the "Kadett" has had alot of badges on all the chassis that it has had! One wonders how many car were built off the base chassis, I've never seen anyone coplie the individual numbers :)

In reply to Cassius :

Cool, I thought it looked Audi-like, but couldn't be sure. Ambitious project! Do you have a build thread somewhere or is it all on your instagram?

Duder said:

In reply to Cassius :

Cool, I thought it looked Audi-like, but couldn't be sure. Ambitious project! Do you have a build thread somewhere or is it all on your instagram?

Instagram is  just a couple of pics, and some tiny bits of info :) The mostly complete story can be had here: https://rejsa.nu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=25879
In swedish.. :)

The original plan was simple! But then came the aging, and with it growing confidence, growing paychecks and then also growing ambitions.. (I'm still not that old, only 34. But I've had that car for 16 years now!) If I had stuck with one of the 4 cyl plans (of which there were many... Opel CIH NA or supercharged, Saab B204 turbo, Toyota 3SGE beams or turbo, BMW M42B18, VAG 1.8T, GM/Opel Z22SE, I also investigated putting a rotary in it, a couple of different V6's too. To much to choose from!) it would probably be driveable now! But one day, hopefully, the headaches will cease and I'll be screaming down some straight at 8k rpm with smoking tires! :D

Update - for those who remember these Kadetts.

Sometime around July or August I got a text from Alex V. asking if I wanted to take stewardship of the Opile. I said yes, of course! Pretty much immediately. I wasn't expecting him to be ready to part with the car, but he's moved on to various other projects including motorcycles. I think he had basically accomplished everything he set out to do with the Opile except maybe for a transmission swap to something more modern / robust.

So I brought home the car in late September, after getting the full download from Alex on various possible clutch & trans upgrades that he was mentally marinating for a while. Anyway he is still "on the team" and a member of our workshop, and he will of course be first on the list of invited drivers next time we race this thing.

Alex awkens the Opile from its slumber in his Glendale driveway:

Proud new owner poses with the steed:

Back home in Torrance, meeting up with my wife's 2002

But before bringing home another vehicle I had to make some room for it... in space, time, and wallet. So I awoke my '66 Beetle from its 2-year slumber and sold it to family friends to become their oldest daughter's first car, and a father/daughter project. This was my first car, I'd had it for over 20 years and had resisted selling it for a long time for sentimental reasons. The reality was it was sad to see it sit while I was occupied with other activities. So I refreshed the whole fuel system, gave it a thorough tune-up, spruced up the interior with new rubber mats and some OG '66 door cards, and then moved it along to a happy new home.

Two years of crustiness...

After cleaning & tune-up. It ran just as well as ever with only a modest amount of work.

Fresh rubbers:

Inside the doors of a 56-year-old CA car after some cleaning and WD-40:

The "finished" interior...

Bye, little Beetle!

Next on the chopping block was the '93 Miata that my wife and I had been using as a street legal trackday car for the past 5 or 6 years. We had lots of great experiences & memories with this car at Laguna Seca and Buttonwillow, but the Opile has 2 seats and a full cage, and now can turn pretty much identical laptimes to the average NA Miata on the same tires. So having the Miata became kind of redundant. This was a great car with the bone-stock 1.6 and stock suspension, Blackbird Fabworx rollbar, Sparco seats / steering wheel, and harnesses. We ran Falken Azenis 615Ks on this just like the Lemons cars. I did some paint correction and a few maintenance jobs, then sold it on Cars & Bids to a father & son who were super stoked about it and flew out from SLC to LA the very next day to pick it up and drive it home.

The Little Red Kadett as seen in this thread will also be moving along eventually, as will the Kadett Rallye parts car (which became mine when I bought the Opile). I'll have more updates on the LRK as I start giving it attention again and get it ready for whoever the next owner will be.

In the meantime, the Opile has done duty as a hit Halloween decoration in our front yard, and a great Cars & Coffee conveyance.

Obligatory & inevitable Magnus Walker shot: