Stripping the body
The complete Berzerkeley chassis
The Berzerkeley motor peeks out
Team member Gary Hunter had the body stripped in a little over a day.
Chassis builder and former GRM/Kumho Challenge winner Denny Crabill brought the now nearly done Berzerkeley to the $2007 Challenge to show competitors and spectators what he had been up to.
With the Challenge, and not the SEMA show over, it is time to dig in and finish the Berzerkeley. The first order of business was to strip the body of its old paint. It does not appear that the fiberglass car had ever been gelcoated.
Team member Gary Hunter had the body stripped in a little over a day. The outside of the body was stripped with 80 grit paper on a DA sander. He also blasted the inside of the body with Eastwood’s unique soda blaster kit. This kit uses less air pressure than a standard media blaster and the baking soda like media cuts well and does lots less damage to delicate old fiberglass than standard sand.
With the body stripped and cleaned it was once again time to fit the body to the chassis. This time, rather than pull the engine and disassemble the frame, we took the three-piece body apart. We were planning on re-riveting and bonding the body pieces together anyway so this proved to be a valuable step.
At this point we also got our 13x5.5” alloy wheels (bought from someone’s abandoned BMW 2002 project at a swap meet for $100) cleaned up. To these wheels we mounted some Kumho 215/50x13” tires. These Kumhos stretch the limits of a 5.5” wide wheel, but give us a great footprint and the ECSTA V710s are some of the fastest tires we have ever tested.
With the body mounted it was clear we would need slightly more wheel well in the front and we also had to adjust the shape of the dash to fit around the killer paddle shifters that Denny had designed. The modifications were so easy to do in fiberglass. In fact, we got most of the glass work done on the body on one Saturday all for the cost of materials, which was about $100.
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