- Adam Administrator
Prototype 1 worked well enough for what it was. When we started building it, our goal was to make a low cost midengined street car out of an inexpensive donor. It turned out great and is a blast to drive, but next to prototype 2 or the new production frames it looks outdated and has minor quirks that make it less appealing to drive.
So instead of letting the powertrain, tires, wheels and everything else go to waste sitting in the old frame, we've decided to do a transplant. We are going to keep prototype 1 alive by rebuilding it in a new city frame. More specifically production frame #1.
Production frame #1 was used to finalize much of the tooling and we built it before the others to test fit the turbo engine. When we slipped the frame down over the Cobalt SS/TC powertrain, we found that the rear strut cross support got in the way of the turbo. We knew that this frame would never be turbo charged so we left it as it was, but we used what we learned to modify our tooling to relocate the cross support on all production frames from then on. So production frame #1 is a bit of an oddball compared to the others.
We plan to modify and reuse the body panels from prototype 1. As a refresher, here's what they looked like on the car:
Obviously we are going to have to chop off a portion of the nose to make the new nose cone with the radiator opening like in this rendering of the new body panels:
It's hard to tell in the P1 photo, but the green we used for the stripes on the original body was a candy green over a metallic silver. We really like this metallic green, so we asked the powder coating shop about doing a color like this and they helped us pick a color that looks amazing. (The clouds were not working with us when we tried to take photos of the frame so the color is a little dull. Luckily, I took a photo at the powder coat shop while the sun was still out so at least you get to see a close up of the green.)
We will be transferring the prototype 1 hardware to the next frame in the near future. First we need to do the other two cars we plan to do in-house so that we can use photos, videos and other info from those builds to give you guys instructions as you build your kits.
So instead of letting the powertrain, tires, wheels and everything else go to waste sitting in the old frame, we've decided to do a transplant. We are going to keep prototype 1 alive by rebuilding it in a new city frame. More specifically production frame #1.
Production frame #1 was used to finalize much of the tooling and we built it before the others to test fit the turbo engine. When we slipped the frame down over the Cobalt SS/TC powertrain, we found that the rear strut cross support got in the way of the turbo. We knew that this frame would never be turbo charged so we left it as it was, but we used what we learned to modify our tooling to relocate the cross support on all production frames from then on. So production frame #1 is a bit of an oddball compared to the others.
We plan to modify and reuse the body panels from prototype 1. As a refresher, here's what they looked like on the car:
Obviously we are going to have to chop off a portion of the nose to make the new nose cone with the radiator opening like in this rendering of the new body panels:
It's hard to tell in the P1 photo, but the green we used for the stripes on the original body was a candy green over a metallic silver. We really like this metallic green, so we asked the powder coating shop about doing a color like this and they helped us pick a color that looks amazing. (The clouds were not working with us when we tried to take photos of the frame so the color is a little dull. Luckily, I took a photo at the powder coat shop while the sun was still out so at least you get to see a close up of the green.)
We will be transferring the prototype 1 hardware to the next frame in the near future. First we need to do the other two cars we plan to do in-house so that we can use photos, videos and other info from those builds to give you guys instructions as you build your kits.
