36. “Brace yourself” – Cam

Posted by Cam on

Cam (MacIsaac) has one of the highest, if not the highest, mileage SLCs on the road.  He’s the owner of chassis #36, click here for a link to his build thread.  So when he says “Listen here sonny, you pay attention to this” – you pay attention!  (OK, he didn’t say it in those words, I’m sure CamM’s a young lad and has never said “Listen here sonny” – but I thought it would be funny for the purposes of this blog entry).  CamM’s provided great insight in the past on other issues and he’s pretty much experienced all the initial teething pains on this platform.  He experienced some stress cracks on his race tail and recommended I go back in and reinforce those areas to mitigate against cracks on my car.

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A crack located on the transition from horizontal to vertical.
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2 cracks; one running from the interior diffuser cutout along the top and another going toward the rear taillight cutout.

So V2.0 of my race tail reinforcement consists of 3 layers of 1.5oz CSM and 1 layer of 4oz fiberglass cloth.

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The sharp black line running 30-deg from vertical is about where CamM’s crack formed.  I extended the reinforcement to about 7-8″ from the forward edge of the tail.  You don’t want to add too much material immediately around the fuel door cutout otherwise the two body panels won’t sit flush against each other.
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Same deal on the driver side.
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At the rear, I used 4″ wide strips along the entire width, from taillight to taillight.  The cracks are likely forming due to stresses caused by the tail vibrating up and down.  The reinforcement is U-shaped and covers the entire rear edge.
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The areas inboard of the taillight cutouts were reinforced up to the edge of the diffuser opening.  All that extra fiberglass “hair” will need to be trimmed and cleaned up once the resin has cured.

A huge thanks to CamM for reaching out to me and making sure I didn’t miss this (I would have).  I had already known about the weak point along the rear-most area of the tail, but hadn’t heard about the crack going to the taillight cutout or the one along the top surface.

That’s it.  A short post but I thought it was fitting to make Blog entry #36 all about information gleaned from car #36.

 

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