Bracey
New Member
I figured 8 years was long enough to wait before putting up a build thread. I’ll try and remember some of the stuff I’ve done to it over the years but most prob just jump into the recent stuff as that’s much more interesting.
So back in 2009 when you could pick up s-bodies for pennies I went and bought this completely stock s14a with 33k on the clock and an auto box. It had some light front end damage which only made it cheaper...
The plan was to run it as a daily, so it spent half its life outside work/skatepark/tesco/pub with the odd track day at Oulton and Cadwell Park thrown in.
By 2015 it had a cookie-cutter stage 1a spec, coilovers/arms, manual box and was still pretty mint. Come Easter I decided to book onto its first drift day which was up at Teesside.. and following that Buxton.. and then pretty much every drift event I could afford to get too.
I’d always had a thing for trying to keep the fitment pretty decent but I started to get a little obsessed with trying to run it as low as possible. This shot from Teesside shows how it currently sits.
Id settled on this been the perfect ride height for an s14 in terms of looks but anyone who’s ran a low s-body for a while will know that you run into various performance issues...
First of all the front subframe. It sits lower than the chassis rails and at about 30mm from the ground at this ride height it takes a beating driving on anything but the smoothest roads (the drive to Buxton is especially painful
) and on some tracks. I was booked to drive both days at STL2 at Driftland in July, only half an hour into the 1st morning this happened.Bent tie rod and lower control arm. Something went bang on entry and I hadn't had any crashes yet so was a bit of a mystery at first as to what caused it. Managed to get lucky and find a local lad with a pair of 20mm extended lower arms for sale (thanks to everyone who went on the hunt for some!) and was back up and running for the next morning... something wasn't right though. The car was grounding out a lot more than normal and on the couple of areas with subsided tarmac the car was jumping all over with massive ground contact when on lock.
Jacked it up back in the pits and noticed that one of the tie rod knuckles had been grinding on the floor and the steering rack mounts were twisted so the steering rack was pointing to the floor at one end. At this point I was pretty fed up and thought it best to raise the car 30mm at the front, pack up and head home. Ali had put on an awesome event so was pretty gutted to miss driving most of it .
The photographers were on it from the start though so I was pleased they managed to get a few decent shots.
The subframe damage was worse than I thought.
I wanted to make the car more drivable on the road and prevent the above happening again, but I didn’t want to raise the car in any way. So I came up with an idea to modify the front subframe so it sits 20mm higher - roughly in line with the chassis rails. This would also provide 20mm of much needed roll centre correction too.
With a fresh subframe from ebay, I fabricated a jig that picks up enough datum points to keep everything square once cut up and also strong enough to not distort when welding it all back together. The jig incorporated a 20mm packer sat under the cross member that could be removed to raise the cross member to its new height.
Then ground out the factory welds to split the chassis/engine mount brackets from the cross member.
Then Trimmed material from the brackets until the cross member sat nicely without the 20mm packer. This took hours to get perfect! Also had to trim material from either end of the cross member. Then it was just a case of welding it all back together.
Forgot to take a finished photo on the bench but here it is hanging ready for a quick skim of primer.
And here it is bolted back up for its first test fit. Hockey puck thrown under for a sense of ground clearance scale.
Easy right? Not quite haha... More to follow
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