It's done--a few things learned along the way, and it's not an easy task, without help. To that end, MANY thanks go to Scott Walker (novadeuce), his son Alex, and Sandi - Scott's wife and Alex' mom, for their full support of my efforts, use of the lift(s) in their beautiful new garage, and especially the care and feeding Sandi offers to all of us while we play in the ultimate man-cave!
The "no copy" custom grille is on loan from the Walkers for the trip to G8 Extravaganza next weekend. This part alone represents literally hundreds of hours of hand work by Scott.
I took these photos after driving home from Walker's--over an hour away. The car has been both inside & outside over the past month it's been at their house, and it's far from clean and ready for these photos....a good cleaning is due before heading to Valdosta on Friday morning.
The idea and production of this splitter came long before I was aware of the use of the air flow channel strips on the ZL1 Camaro--right or wrong, I decided to go ahead and install them during the process. As I understand it, for the Camaro, these are designed to help move air out from under the car to enhance front downforce in track events. The channels are a combination of plastic mounting strips, and the actual channel projection is rubber. They mount on the underside of the front wheelhouse closeout panels on the ZL1--to the moulded plastic "cloth" material (collects dirt and particulates easily) that has become common today. The effect these parts can have is probably greater with them running closer to the ground than is the case currently with this installation, on SS springs--Camaro ZL1 has less ground clearance by far, even when PPV is lowered from stock to SS height.
Working through several ideas on mounting the channels, and much combing through the McMaster-Carr catalog finally produced an acceptable solution, even though it meant drilling holes through the splitter itself, disturbing the cloth finish layer in multiple places...the splitter is about 0.400" thick, and if there are other solutions, I would need to study the options for awhile to repeat the process and use the ZL1 parts again.
The splitter panel itself is secured to the car both with 4 hard mount points, using M8x1.25 bolts into the front frame/engine cradle structure, and via the 4 additional mounting points between the lower deflector and the front fascia--the 2 center front positions were changed to M6x1.0 with a longer screw (50mm) to reach through the splitter, with 1" spacers installed (visible in one photo) to tie things together with the splitter, bumper cover and lower deflector, which remains in place. My objective was to mount the splitter without any external supports, which I believe is most fitting for a 4-door sedan. If the splitter was extended further out (more aggressive), I would have to reconsider that--the splitter can be made longer, and we decided in the beginning to remain at the length you see here, at least for this original/prototype part--fewer issues with ground clearance in most normal "street" situations.
The front wheel opening deflectors remain a bit of a work in progress, and we hit upon a different idea as to how to implement them after the current design was already set, and depending on how this method survives in the short term, we'll revisit this with another approach.
The splitter still needs to come off one last time to have a clear coat finish applied for better long-term survival from exposure to the elements.
The wheels are those I posted about in another thread - BBS forged, 18x9, +47 offset, weighing 18.3# each.
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