"Case Modding" a Nissan Sentra 422
Lawrence Person writes "Given all the interest Slashdot has shown in casemodding as of late, I thought they might be interested in an extreme "casemod" of a Nissan Sentra, turning it into a lean, mean race machine! Emphasis on the lean part..."
nice magazine, throwaway article (Score:2, Interesting)
'86 econobox (Score:2, Interesting)
Better with a beetle (Score:5, Interesting)
I did this about 10 years ago with an old VW Beetle that a friend and I bought for $250. Here's the only picture that I have of it:
http://www.michaelchaney.com/beetle/beetle.jpg [michaelchaney.com]
We removed the body, then welded a small frame for the steering column, and used duct tape to attach the speedometer. We welded on a battery holder, and I screwed the voltage regulator, an on/off switch, and a start button to another plate. The gas tank was simply a two gallon plastic tank that we ran the hose into. (not recommended) The last mod was welding the seat to the bottom of the unibody, we didn't bother to add a back, a fact which made driving it a bit more difficult.
Anyway, it's the same idea as this article. My friend and I were going to build a really fast go-kart, and we actually started welding one together. We had an engine, but when we started to buy parts to finish it out, we realized that it was going to cost another few hundred dollars. I decided that it was worthless, since we could buy an old Beetle for less and just remove the extraneous parts.
I personally topped the speedometer out (85MPH) with this configuration, the wind was difficult to deal with since I had no seat back. The acceleration was great, with the extra weight gone it was incredible. Dumb as hell, but incredible. Funny thing was, when my friend and I finished, his father admitted that he'd done the same thing 20 years earlier.
Michael
Ugh (Score:4, Interesting)
Add ~200 lbs of steel bumber, and another 100 lbs of re-bar inside the fenders, and my rust bucket Mopar with a 383 stroker still pulls low 14s on a bad day. Those hopped up go-carts are worthless junk IMO.
sentra (Score:1, Interesting)
for a good laugh, goto http://www.riceboypage.com
interesting mods there, not that i dont like imports or nothing but some people can go overboard
Re:Can't believe it took this long... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Can't believe it took this long... (Score:2, Interesting)
There's no accounting for taste, but most [ricecop.com] of the mods are total crap. Double-bookshelf wings on FWD cars, ugly bodykits that add an insane amount of weight and screw up the car's aeordynamics, neon lights that do nothing but annoy other drivers, outrageously large wheels ("rims", as the "tunerz" call them) that ride like shit, lowered suspensions without an accompanying alignment (or worse, suspensions lowered simply by cutting the springs already there, rather than replacing with proper springs), decals that are silly (yes, your Civic is a Honda, we know that; so why must you have "Powered by Honda" on your front windscreen, obscuring half of your forward vision?), re-badging (the Civic Type-R is only available as a right-hand drive car, because it's only available in Japan; adding a Type-R badge and the red Honda "H" does not make your Civic a Type-R), Z3 fender gills on non-Z3s, etc.
Unfortunately, this isn't even limited to the sport compact crowd, either. Look on ebay to see a whole slew of ruined older 911s that would be great except that the owners decided to "upgrade" them. Be very careful, because that 993 you're looking at may not be a 993 at all, but a 79 911SC with a 993 body.
Maybe somebody thinks these mods look good, and some of them do (a high-quality custom paint job, for example). Most, however, look like crap. They add nothing to the car, and just single you out as a poseur. Not to mention that most people doing these mods think they somehow make their cars fast, and then try to race anything and everything on the road. There's a place for racing, and it's not on the street.
Why this is funny. (Score:4, Interesting)
To put it in computer terms, these guys took dual pentium 2.5 ghz with a raid 5 scsi array and 4 gigs of RAM and laid out all the pieces on some blocks of wood to make fun of people who put a pentium 150 with an old ide drive and 32 megs of RAM into a chrome case with a window and flashing neon lights inside.
Thinking of Little Blue *sniff* (Score:5, Interesting)
It leaked like a seive, when you turned the wipers on, the left turn signal came on, it beat voltage regulators to death in less than 24 hours. The steering was beefed up - 3/4ths turn lock to lock. The suspension was stiffened - drive over a cigarette butt and you felt it. It could hit 120mph before redline, turned on a dime (and gave you 8% interest!), and ran on regular gas. I even, once, push-started it by myself, *up* a slight hill. It was *very* light
I really miss that car. It used to destroy pressure plates and clutches with great frequency, and the last one I put in was a Kennedy Racing 1800-pound pressure plate. Even with that, the clutch was starting to glaze, just before the pedal broke. The idiot who was driving it at the time just gear-jammed it all the way home, destroying it utterly.
I really miss that car. It had more spirit than any car I've ever had, before or since. I'm glad to see a story on
Re:Can't believe it took this long... (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess it really depends on the goal, but if I were trying to lower my car for better handling, I'd do it by replacing the springs rather than cutting the springs I already have. Sure, it costs more money, but then I have springs that were designed for lowering the car rather than springs that have been cut. Same with bending struts for cambe. If I can't get enough camber out of the suspension components I have, I'll replace them with more adjustable components. Once you start bending and cutting stuff, I'm loathe to assume that those components are still structurally sound, and that's the last thing I want to worry about out on the track.
Personally, I wouldn't worry about cars with drag tires on them, because I don't drag race (my car is not a drag racer, even if I wanted it to be). As well, the car may be fast, but if the guy is challenging me on the street I just shake my head and ignore him (like some jackhole in a MB C35 AMG tried to do today on the interstate -- he was driving like a maniac, and tried to race me and an S2000; we both ignored him, so he sped off like a moron, endangering the lives of everybody on the road).
When I see that, I usually assume the goal was to fit wider wheels on the car than stock. Useful in a RWD car to help reduce understeer/increase oversteer, since most cars have understeer dialed in from the factory. Pretty useless on a FWD car except for the larger patch of rubber, but then it's usually the rear tires these guys do, anyway, which gives absolutely no benefit. Personally, I might be tempted to put 10" or 10.5" wheels on my car (my rears right now are 8.5" fronts and 9.5" rears, with 205/17s on the front and 255/17s on the rear), but most likely I'll stick with the wheels I have and put 225/17s on the front when it comes time to change the rubber (soon). I certainly wouldn't go any larger than that, especially since I'm in a rainy area, and wider tires lead to more pronounced hyrdoplanning.
This is easy with Minis (Score:4, Interesting)
More Molested Cars... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What an overweight turd (Score:4, Interesting)
The next time I see some idiot motoring down the street in a riced out 4-cyl. with a giant aluminum rear spoiler, glasspack muffler, "blackout" or clear polycarbonate head/tailights, 3cm of ground clearance, tires that belong at Indy, and decals for products the owner is not paid to endorse (and are probably not present in the car), I will remember this article. And then I will laugh.
Re:What an overweight turd (Score:3, Interesting)
Agree completely with what you're saying - but I would like to add a note about downforce and drag. They can and do have an effect even under mere street/highway-racer speeds. Drag in particular is apparent on a straight highway where max speed is all that matters. My extremely (for a sporty car) un-aerodynamic trans am gets drag-limited at around 160mph on the highway, with plenty left on the gears (good luck redlining 6th
Re:Old News If You're Into Imports.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was lucky enough to have worked a few saturdays with an editor of SCC on his project car. He showed me to a few of their cars and said something interesting. They don't own them, they are special liscenced with the auto manufacturers. This is true with their WRX and Sylvia and others. Its one of the ways they get around smog restraints.
I'll have to ask him if this was one of those cars, but it sounds like when the lease expires they are supposed to trash the car. What a way to go...
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http://onroad.onlawn.net is down for repairs.
Re:Can't believe it took this long... (Score:1, Interesting)
A good set of springs is pretty cheap, so I do not see any benifit to this.
Also a lot of the cars modded to have their tires stick out of the fenderwells run narrow enough tires that this mod is pointless. It is purely for asthetics, and is usually combined with whitewall tires and chrome or gold spoked rims. And it absolutely destroys the cars handling by changing the effective geometry of the suspension.