Cyberpunk Mx-5 Build

[Doritofu]

So version 2 of this car is officially underway now and I've just completed the first small cosmetic change which was making a new auxiliary cooler housing to swap out the old external oil cooler setup and bring the car a little more in line with the cyberpunk vision I had for it.

The first step was to rip off the old cooler and get started mocking up some templates and quick sketches figuring out where I wanted to go with the new look.

After coming up with some designs I got started on shaping the housing. For this I went back to my roots and poured a block of expanding foam so I could slowly shave it down to the exact shape I needed.

Once the shape was good I threw a layer of 80gsm fiberglass tissue over the top to seal the foam and give me a rigid surface to start building layers of glass off.

After a few more layers of glass the housing was trimmed to fit the bumper using profile gauges to get it all to fit.

With the housing fitting mint and placement all how I wanted it I could start bring back some of the harder edges that got softened off by all the layers of glass. Normally you build from outside in with fiberglass moulds, but for these one offs you actually build on top so you have to make your initial form a few mm undersize on all edges.

There was also a small block that I wanted to fit on the fender by the A-pillar that would take the hoses from the cooler. For this version I've decided to run my hoses up over the front fender instead of across the bumper.

The block was fitted in places using some small aluminium brackets tapped out to take 3 m5 screws.

After finishing up the main housing and the extra fender block I filled all the small pinholes with some glaze putty, sanded it all down with 240 and hit it with a few coats of primer.

The last thing to do was match the weathering to the car and fit it all back up.

For the weathering I did the same as the car body. Covered the whole thing with a wash of black paint and then wiped as much of it off as I could. This leaves a really good bit of grime and dirt in all the recess of the housing. After that I hit all the edges and lines with the airbrush to add some extra definition to all the edges in a step called post shading.

Now here's some quick pics of the car with everything all fitted back up and out in the rain for some shots.

As I mentioned before, I've decided that I'm going to be filming this stage of the build and the first video on this cooler housing is now live on my YouTube channel. You can check it out here:


I've got a few more small things like this that I'll be adding over the next few months between work and then once that's all out of the way I'll be focusing on the rear of the car and start changing things up pretty dramatically.

 

[Dirk Jan]

The creativity and craftmanship of this build is unreal dude

 

[Doritofu]

The creativity and craftmanship of this build is unreal dude

Cheers bro, really appreciate it!

So I've had my head down the past couple weeks working on fiberglass and doing other small things. I ran into an issue with the latest batch of gelcoat I was sent by my supplier and something is definitely wrong with it because no matter what I do it always hazes up my moulds like a bitch.

This is about the 4th time I've had to repair my mould for the rear garnish and I've just had to fully resand and polish the moulds for the flares.

In the mean time I'm trying to get to the bottom of what's causing these issues but it doesn't help that my supplier is just straight up ignoring my calls and now they wont even get back to me about my order I'm trying to place for some more resin and acetone. Until that all shows up I'm stuck.

I figured then that now was a good time to do something completely different.

So I've pulled out my original aerocover mould and given it a bit of a tidy up so I can start experimenting with some new things in between projects.

In this case:

My first attempts at some actual carbon fiber.

The goal is to remake my wheel covers out of carbon and this time make them into functional turbo fans. I'm thinking of running 2 different designs front and rear, and playing with this carbon is the first step in getting there.

But I didn't really want to waste all this carbon just figuring out what I was doing so I've picked up this little set of vents that I'll be making a mould off so I've got something small I can experiment on just to stop me wasting so much material.

First step is plug making.

For this all I had to do was tape up all the holes and back fill them with bog so I could have a nice solid shape to pull a mould off. Then I stuck it all down to a flat surface and sanded it all up.

Then I gave it some thick coats of epoxy primer to seal it all up and give me a nice hard surface to polish and give the mould a perfect glass like finish.

After that had a day to cure I pulled out my materials for the tooling gelcoat and realised I am fully out of acetone. So right now I'm stuck waiting on materials.

Normally I'd just drive the 2 hours down to the city and pick it up in person then drive 2 hours back, but the borders are closed right now cause of Covid and it's really screwing me over.

So that's all I can do for now.

Cooool.

I'm doing a little bit more work into the livery of this car trying to create some stencils and extra details that I can paint all over the car just to tie it all together a bit better and give it more of that cyberpunk vibe so that's probably what I'll be focusing on for the next little bit.

 

[s15-newbie]

Wow, the oil cooler housing looks amazing.

Do you spraying your coat? What type of gun and nozzle are you using for it and which viscosity for the coat?

 

[Doritofu]

Wow, the oil cooler housing looks amazing.

Do you spraying your coat? What type of gun and nozzle are you using for it and which viscosity for the coat?

Cheers mate, going to be doing some more custom fiberglass work around the car to really tie everything in.

I spray my gelcoat with a 3.0mm nozzle on my dedicated gelcoat gun. Turns out the problem in the end wasn't with the gelcoat, but with the PVA layer underneath. I wasn't spraying a thick enough layer of PVA release film onto my moulds and what was happening is the gelcoat was eating through it and then a tiny bit of my gelcoat ended up underneath the release film layer. Since it was so thin it never cured properly so when the resin went on afterwards it ended up attacking the part.

The solution was basically to just give up on the PVA. I've stopped using it at all and now my parts come out perfectly every time.

The only time I use PVA on a mould now is if it's fresh or a temporary mould for a 1 off part and I dont want to polish it too heavily. Even then I mostly wipe it on with a cloth instead of spray it.

 

[Doritofu]

It's been so long I've almost forgotten how to even do this but here goes.

The Mx5 is back in the barn and I am finally starting on it after over a year of talking about it.

So I dont know if anyone here even remembers, but I had some plans for the rear end on this thing that I just didn't have time to finish before the show it was entered in so I just sort of threw a bunch of things together and called it a day.

Well after a year of looking at it I've finally grown tired of it and so for the past few months I've been sketching and coming up with designs on how to get it looking exactly how I want it.

First step though is tear down.

Even just looking like this I think I like it more than before.

So one thing that I've been meaning to tackle for a while is this rear ducktail spoiler. It was a semi custom piece that I made and since then a lot of people have expressed interest in it. Initially I wasn't confident with making these but I've expanded my skills a bit the past year and so think I'm finally ready.

The first step was to rebuild the edges and get it to the right dimensions to work without my custom spoiler end plates.

once I got the gaps looking good and lining up with the OEM fitment I could start working on plug prep.

For this I used my standard clear plastic flange method as I find this just gives me a bit more rigidity than cardboard and lets me work with the plug a bit to make a really good quality mould.

With the flanges designed and trimmed I went ahead and fixed everything together. Gluing and screwing the spoiler off to the boot to make sure that the mould would be a 100% form fitting shape and avoid all that horrible warping you often see on these spoilers.

You can see I've screwed pretty heavily into my bootlid. It's not going to be a problem for reasons you'll all see hopefully pretty soon, but that's where we're at at the moment.

I'm going to try keep you all updated with this as we go but I plan to smash out the moulds for this 3 piece spoiler and then I can get stuck in to the new design for this mx5.

 

[Doritofu]

Been making good progress on these moulds the past few days, starting with cleaning up all the screw heads and then priming the plugs with the same 2 part epoxy sealer I used on my other moulds.

The finish was pretty flat out of the gun but they all got wetsanded anyway.

Went through the grits up to 3000 and then swapped over to cutting compound to get a mould quality finish.

Then after that I gave the plugs a good 5 layers of wax and fitted the flanges.

These flanges were such an unbelievable pain in the ass to make and I'm still wondering if I tackled it the right way. I made a carboard template using my contour gauges and transferred it to this clear plastic I like to use but only had 1 shot to cut it absolutely perfectly as I couldn't fill any gaps between the flange and the part.

I need to have that seam down the middle of the spoiler because I will have to make the final parts in 2 pieces and glue them together. Having the seam down the middle was the easiest bet.

With that done though I could finally move on to applying PVA release film which I do for all my moulds and then I could spray my gelcoat.

This was my first time spraying my tooling gelcoat and wasn't even sure it was going to work since it's a bit thicker than my normal gelcoats, but it came out mint and I'm way happier with the more uniform coat you get with spraying rather than brushing it on which always leaves thick / thin spots.

I always aim to spray my gelcoat in the evening once it's cooled off a little as it stops it all from going off in the pot. Then I just leave it overnight to cure and comeback and throw the skin coat on first thing in the morning.

and that leaves us here at the end of today.

Both the skin coat (1 layer of tissue followed by 1 layer of 225 gsm mat) and the first couple layers of 450 gsm are down so I'll let this cure up over night and then tomorrow I should be able to smash out the next 3 coats.

Aiming to build this mould up to a total of 8 layers of 450 as well as a bit of reinforcement along the edge that bolts to the bootlid to hopefully prevent the awful warping you always see in this type of part.

Should have more updates in a couple of days once this side of the mould is finished then I can pull the flanges off and start work on the other sides.

 

[Doritofu]

So quick update on the mould making.

Since last time I've finished off the first side of the split moulds.

I tried out a new method for reinforcing my moulds after discovering a technique that I've been using on a few of the the parts I've been making.

I use pieces of expanding foam that I cut from a billet I keep lying around to reinforce certain parts I make like my rear garnish. The foam itself does nothing, but when it is wrapped in a couple layers of fiberglass the added dimensions provide a massive increase in strength for not much added weight.

I find the trick works well and since the foam is a neutral material with no expansion or swelling like wood that I used on my other moulds, I don't have to worry about any artifacts of the bracing showing up on the mould surface.

With 8 layers of glass built up as well as the additional bracing for the central piece I could remove the flanges and start on the other side of the mould.

Then exactly the same process as the other sides. 2 layers of gelcoat sprayed on (extra fun fact I found about gelcoat but you'll see that in a later update), then the coupling / skin coat of tissue and 225, then 6 - 7 layers of 450 over the span of a couple days to keep heat down and reduce chance of warping of the mould.

Then the moulds were ready to be pulled from the plugs.

Each layer of glass added approximately 1mm and so the final moulds came out to be around 8mm thick on each side. These things are incredibly solid. Possibly overkill but what's a little extra glass for the reassurance that every part will be exactly the same shape forever.

One small issue I did run into was on the central piece. Over the week or so that it had been glued together with the flanges and everything, the spoiler had started to slowly separate from the boot. This meant that the curvature of the mould would not be a perfect match to the bootlid and so I had to fix this before building up the main body of fiberglass.

The parts were clamped back together and a much stronger glue was used to bond them back together. I'm giving this 24 hours to harden before I remove the clamps and finish building up the fiberglass but when that's done the entire set of moulds will be finished.

So for now I've trimmed up the two side caps and started removing all the masking from the car in preparation for the next step of this build.

Cant even tell you guys how excited I am to start working on the new changes to this car and also how stoked I am with how these moulds have come out so far.

Hopefully I'll be back in a couple days with the final post on making these moulds and then we can get stuck in to the rear end.

 

[Doritofu]

SIKE!

Yeah the clamping thing didn't do shit. Which to be honest, I kind of expected but decided what's a couple extra days to do things properly.

So off comes the mould before I waste too much fiberglass on something that I know wont be any good.

Then all the glue and old flange was removed and thoroughly cleaned out so new flanges could be made then the whole spoiler was screwed off to the bootlid to make sure there was no fuckery this time around.

So that was a pretty annoying extra 2 days of work and a couple steps back but now the plug is finished up and all polished and waxed ready for gelcoat.

I need to get this mould finished off asap so that I can throw this bootlid back on the car and start working on it. So next update will be all the moulds done and I can show you guys what I'm going to be doing with the rear of the car.

 

[Doritofu]

Update time.

So after waiting a few days for some more fiberglass to arrive I was able to finish up the moulds.

Same as my last moulds, these ones are about 8 - 10mm thick. Makes them solid as hell and no chance that they could warp at all so the parts from it will fit 100%.

You can spot in my last post but since I had the primer out I took the opportunity to fix up the vents I was working on and finished up the mould for that as well.

Overall I'm stoked with how all the moulds came out. I've got a tiny bit of polishing to do before I can start making pulls and selling copies but I've got more important things to tackle first.

So you can see the boot has been stripped down and refitted to the car in preparation for the new design which I have been waiting to start for a while.

The rear quarters were masked off and I started laying out some rough lines. I'm going to be designing my own fastback roof to give the car a much more cyberpunk vibe. It's heavily inspired by the FD RX7 bootlid with a few cyberpunk elements added in to tie the whole car together and then eventually a new spoiler. The first part to make however was the base for the new roof.

Laser level came in handy again getting this line perfectly centered up the center of the car.

Then I came back in and refined the lines I was going to make for the new roofline.

Once I was happy with the curves I transferred them to the other side using a template. Then I started planning out exactly how I wanted the roofline to look.

This process was a huge amount of back and forth throwing a new line up on the cardboard, stepping back, seeing if it worked, changing it by only a couple mms and then re-checking. After almost a good hour of this I was finally happy with the shape and transferred it to a wooden template that would guide me when sanding the foam.

Speaking of foam, the perimeter was boarded up to catch any spillage since this expanding foam gets everywhere and then I proceeded to pour all that was left of my expanding foam onto this to give me plenty of material to carve down and get the exact shape I was after.

It was a bit gutted to have to cover up the old roof with the pill and other stickers but this car was always meant to be a constant evolution so it is what it is.

And that's where the car is at right now. I'll be trimming and sanding it all down over the next few days to get it exactly where I want it and then will be back with another update once this rough shaping is done and we move on to the next parts.

 

[Doritofu]

This is coming along way faster than I expected.

You'll have to forgive me but since I was straight zooming along I forgot to take progress photos, but the foam has been carved down and the roofline is now all fleshed out.

I shaped the whole LHS first, doing my best to slowly trim down to the final shape so I wouldn't have to pour any more foam but the cheese grater goes through this foam like nobodies business so I had to re-pour a couple times. Eventually I got the whole LHS where I wanted it, made some more templates and then finished the RHS.

I think the final shape really captures what I was going for with the FD bootlid design but modified to work with the shapes I'm dealing with.

Tomorrow I start refining this shape with filler just so I have something solid that I can glass over and once the filling is done I'll start on the next piece which will be my lip spoiler / speed tail. If I made it now I would have just kept bumping into it and breaking shit off. See? I'm learning.

 

[Doritofu]

The whole roof has been covered in filler and I've started the main sanding process.

After a couple of days I had the roof pretty much to a state I was happy with.

Very difficult to capture the lines with the plaster all white but the main thing is I can move forward with the rest of the roof and so will be focusing on the speed tail spoiler next.

Updates might take a brief pause as I've just had another job from a client come in.

I've got a bit of fiberglass repair work to do on this '76 mkII Escort as well as some modifications to make to an AE86 bumper. I might be able to slowly chip away at the Mx5 in between jobs on these two but my priority is getting the Escort finished and out of the shop so I have some space back.

 

[hoodedreeper]

Incredible work as always!

Just spotted this in one of the latest Speedhunters articles

 

[Doritofu]

Incredible work as always!

Just spotted this in one of the latest Speedhunters articles

View attachment 326723

Cheers man, and yeah it's pretty awesome now starting to see people who I've sent these kits to are finishing up their builds.

It's a bit of a shame that the pandemic has bumped up international shipping prices so much but I'm hoping to move to Japan at the end of the year which should really bring those shipping prices down quite a lot for all my products.

 

[Doritofu]

The barn is all empty again so time to get stuck back in to this fastback.

I'm working on the spoiler now which is a speedtail inspired by a few other pieces as well as some renders.

So as always, first step is to mock out the shape with cardboard.

Once I had these 5 templates figured out I transferred them to mdf to be fixed to the boot and give me a solid guide to help when shaping the foam.

My legs are killing me from all the squatting over the past couple days to check eye level with all these and making sure everything is absolutely perfect, but eventually I got all the guides sussed.

Next up was the usual step of boxing up and then pouring the expanding foam.

Then about a full day of sanding later I had the top half and the finished outline roughed in.

That's where it's at now, I plan to finish shaping the bottom side of it tomorrow. I plan to do the same thing with filler over the top of this but I know if I do that without reinforcing the foam it will likely crack so I'll be putting a thin coat of fiberglass over the filler just to create a shell that I can put filler over the top of.

 

[Doritofu]

Been making some good progress on this. Started off by applying some fiberglass just to give the foam some strength when it came time to sand the filler.

For the glass I just did 2 layers of 80 gsm tissue. Not trying to build up any real thickness, just trying to make pretty much a shell for the foam so it doesn't move around during the filling stage.

Speaking of, next up was to apply the same filler as for the roof.

One thing I had to sort out with the filler was the far left guide was actually around 10mm too low at the tip. I didn't notice this till reviewing some of the pictures but I used the filler to build up the height again until it was all symmetrical and then shaved off the underside to keep the profiles the same thickness the whole way along.

It took a fair bit of sanding and checking with gauges and templates but I'd say I'm pretty happy with where it's at now.

Now the fastback is ready to make the fiberglass skin.

My plan initially was to build the sharkfin spoiler into the roof but after seeing it all take shape I've actually decided to change the shape / material of the sharkfin and so I will now be adding it as a separate piece afterwards.

To give you an idea of the new shape that I am planning at this stage, here is a super rough initial mockup of what I had in mind.

So hopefully I'll be able to get this roof sealed and the skin fiberglassed pretty soon and once I've got that fiberglass skin I can start cutting louvers, making the sharkfin, and just finishing it all off.

I've got a lot more planned for this rear end so once this roof is finished I'm going to move straight on to the next part which will be the new taillights.

 

[Doritofu]

Alright, update time.

First of all some quick housekeeping.

You guys remember when I first designed these flares and I put heaps of time into them because I said; "What if some random person does a gloss black car and just paints the flares without blocking them?" well it turns out I'm the some random person.

I've been experimenting a lot with different gelcoats on these, starting with white and gray and now I'm testing out a black gelcoat. I've got to say I love how they look fresh out of the moulds and the black makes spotting airbubbles during layup way easier so it's kind of a win win.

But back to the mx5.

I finished off the shape (decided to fill and sand it a bit more since the last update) and then masked off the car and gave it a few coats of Polyurethane sealer to stop the fiberglass from sticking to the plug.

After getting a good glossy finish I left it 36 hours to cure and came back and brushed on a thick coat of the PVA release film and started laying up the skin coat.

Since I'm building this part essential backward from how you would normally fiberglass, the exposed fibers will be on the top surface of the part. You can see how much texture they have and this would have meant both a lot of sanding to flatten them down and also a chance that these fibers show up through the body filler and primer.

That's why that when I laid down the main layup of 450's for my final layer I went over the whole roof with a layer of my lightweight fiberglass tissue which helped soften some of that thicker fiberglass texture.

I really wanted to keep the heat down on this part to prevent warping so I did the layup in 3 passes. The first pass was the 225 gsm skin coat, then followed by the second layer of 450 gsm and then a third layer of another 450 gsm and the tissue on top, letting it cure past peak exotherm between each layer.

Hopefully building it up slowly has kept warping to a minimum but we'll figure that out for sure when it's time to remove the roof from the part.

There is over 10L of resin in this roof. I spent over 9 hours fiberglassing alone...

Oh and here's a link to the latest video up on YouTube about shaping the plug. I'm filming all these steps in detail and posting them there as well so if you want to actually watch the process as well as read these updates check it out.

 

[Doritofu]

Finished up the fiberglass on this roof the other day. I wanted to be sure that there wouldn't be any warping when I removed it from the plug so I left it around 48hs to fully cure up.

I had to cut a line along the tip of the spoiler as the overhang meant that the fiberglass was mechanically trapped to the plug. No issues though because these sorts of spoilers are usually made in 2 pieces glued together.

In addition to gluing the spoiler I'll also be filling it with foam which should add a lot of strength and stop it buckling if anybody rests on it. I also added an extra couple layers of glass around the outside of the spoiler right on the wing tips where the glue wasn't going to hold them strong enough.

But while I waited for that glue to dry I started removing the plug.

And then with that cleaned up I started trimming down the roof. The marks I left on the PVA coat gave me a good guide to cut to but there was a bit more finagling to get it fitting the way I wanted.

Finally time to set the finished fiberglass piece on the car and see how it all fits.

The seam on the spoiler came out pretty good. No airbubbles or gaps and the shape still matched the curves like I had planned. With the foam core as well it was surprisingly solid.

Next up will be working on the louvers and I also plan to come up with a better solution for the door seals on this one, I'd like the finished fastback to be completely waterproof just in case I ever wash it.

 

[Doritofu]

Ok so a bit overdue for an update on this. Been out of town for a week so you'll have to forgive me.

In the last update we finished up laying the fiberglass for the roof and so the next job tot tackle was designing and cutting the louvers for it.

Because there's a specific side profile I'm after I laid out the outline for the rear quarter "windows" first and then got started from there.

For the window shape I went with a modern take on the 240z window as even now the original 240z is still one of the best looking cars of all time. After that I started experimenting with spacing and layout of the louvers.

Initially I used a laser level to mark out slits that were perfectly horizontal but when they ended up projected onto the curve of the roof the upper louvers had more curve than I was after and so I did a few different variations till I found a solution I liked.

Once I'd marked it all out and had spent a full day looking at it to make sure everything was spot on I got the grinder out and started cutting.

Another detail I wanted to add at this stage were some NACA ducts. These are mostly just to break up the open spaces and add some more details to help fit the cyberpunk theme of the build that I was going for. In reality I'll be able to use these ducts to route cool air into the rear mounted battery packs when I finally stop being too poor to afford an EV swap.

Once the ducts and louvers were all cut I made the small adjustments I had to to ensure that all the gaps were tight and then I fitted flanges and prepped the whole roof for fiberglass.

Once the glass had all cured I trimmed all the excess and refitted it to the car.

Now the last thing to add to this roof and by far the bit that takes it the most from just a regular looking car to something that belongs more in a cyberpunk universe is the sharkfin spoiler, here's a little teaser of that.

As with my last update, I have a fully detailed video on the design and build process for these louvers and if you want to check that out as well here's the link:

 

[Doritofu]

Updates on the sharkfin.

So you saw at the end of the last post that I was underway with the plug for this new spoiler. I was able to finish it up and getting looking pretty good and then in order to prep it for fiberglass I wrapped the whole thing in packing tape and gave it a few good coats of PVA. I still hate PVA, I can never get it to spray nice and leave a glossy surface.

Next morning I started fiberglassing. I wanted to make the entire thing solid so I was going to have to do it in 2 stages.

The first stage of fiberglassing went well. The trouble was trying to get the shape off the mould. I soaked the whole thing to try and break down the PVA, I new it would be possible but there is so much suction with a shape like this that I had to cut off the end and hammer it out the opening at the bottom.

Eventually though I got it out. Once it was free I fitted a hollow tube along the very top to allow me to run some wiring and then I filled the rest of it with expanding foam and sealed the whole shape with fiberglass.

And that's pretty much all there was to it.

You can see I made a cutout at the tip and mounted my rear view camera, I still like the idea of having an extra camera for visibility even though it's not as necessary now with the louvers. I just like that it gives an actual functionality to the spoiler.

Overall I couldn't be happier with how it's all come out. Now that the fiberglass is done the next step will be to refine a couple of the lines and then start body filler. It's probably going to take me a while to get it all done but once it's finished I may be checking to see if anyone is interested in buying copies and then I may make some moulds of it.

For now though I'm just loving all these new lines, it's really bringing the car towards the vision I have for it.

Side profile's a little bit iffy at the moment but once the final colour scheme is done it will stand out a lot less than it does right now and will still show the original lines of the fastback.