Beretta.net

My Beretta still needs a lot of work to get going, but in the meantime I'm putting the spotlight on my daily j-body.



In short, I took it autocrossing over the weekend. it's all stock minus the Z26 wheels. It's a handful at its limit but the oem suspension is super communicative and predictable which is always a good thing.



The brakes were worn so I threw on some Powerstop carbon fiber/ceramic pads and went with the drilled/slotted rotors. Normally I stay away from the drilled stuff but since ceramic is not a very good heat sink, that means the rotors is eating most of the heat so I wanted the extra cooling capabilities. The brakes are a huge improvement over the duralast basic ones. Very satisfied with these.





DAT BODYROLL!







Using PAX time, the car came in 129th out of 177 peeps. Not to shabby.

love the jbody, have had so many over the years!

They do love a nice steel strut tower brace and a good steel shock tower brace. Also a K brace really tightens up the front end.
Front: Cavy vert or DC Sports(the only one that fits on my 04)
Rear: RK Sport(out of production) or an Ebay steel(aluminum flexes too much)
http://www.turbotechracing.com/productc ... tegory=522
That is the only place to find the K Brace.

If you are dead set on the RK Sport I have one. It does need longer bolts and a few washers to bolt on. As for the others they just bolt right on. They are not as good, but are close enough for a street car.

Not sure why you went with the Z26 wheels as they are heavy. Five pounds more than Z24 wheels. Hey...fun is fun though.

Awesome find with the K-brace, I honestly had no idea they had them for j bodies. I have the Z26 wheels on out of convenience. The Sunfire tires were worn out and needed replacing so I picked from the Beretta since it had good tires and it wasn't moving anytime soon. My initial mod is probably going to be an addco rear sway to control that roll. I was looking, and they have KW coilovers for j-bodies, that's some serious hardware!

In the meantime I started a project to make le grille resemble the Sunfire GXP concept:




mmmm, gran turismo game Sunfire:




Of course this mod will require moving turn signal duty to the foglight holes, essentially like how the 2000-2002 Sunfires had them from factory.

STEP 1: Buy 41"x13.4" ABS plastic honeycomb mesh grille. Avoid the hardware store gutter mesh special please.


STEP 2: Trace and cut the shape of the grille using whatever is easy for you as a guide. I used a piece of cardboard.



STEP 3: Use guide to outline shape on mesh. Use heavy duty jumbo scissors makes life easy to cut plastic accurately.


Seriously, I felt like a spy cutting through a chain linked fence:




STEP 4: flip over guide and duplicate for the other side:


This is as far as I got today, will update as I go.

Take a look around, there are a few coil overs for these cars. Apex, Tien are some of them(Dspec is what most people used). Just watch your drop! The 1.5 drop on my car turned it into a snow plow. Also going cheap and just getting the springs has not worked out well for me. Coil overs are the way to go.
Oh man I forgot that there is the super rear brace. It goes from the towers down to a cross brace almost all the way to the floor of the trunk. Lost track of it over the years. It's out there, but hard to find in a search.

The DC Sports bar is just a bar and looks nothing like the photo on TTR.

Continuing on from where I left off,

STEP WHATEVER: Spray paint grille+clearcoat.




STEP %: Mount using grey zip ties and invisible hanging wire.





Presto!




Now technically, the grille on the concept looks like its wrapped with weatherstripping on the edges but you get the idea.

I just wanted to see if I could do this, it was never the goal to actually have the grille permanently. A, I really like the OEM design and B, there's no way in hell I'm going to lose my foglights for turn signals lol!

Back to stock:

could do turn sigs behind the presto'ing grill?

Well, when in Rome! I decided to go ahead with whatever it is I do these days. The best part is that everything is 100% reversible with super ease. I moved the turn signals to the foglight holes.

Picked these suckers up for $15 from the junkyard:





The wiring to the stock location is plenty long enough to reach its new home:





The driver's side headlight beam is really weak, usually an issue with the j-bodies. GM uses a really thin gauge of wire to light them up and in time they are prone to corrosion and brittleness.


I literally just move the harness a little bit to undo the tape and two wires instantly break off. I might have to redo this area altogether.


Also I solved the mystery why my wiper fluid wasn't spraying, the hose as been compromised:


In the meantime, I just left the car like this until I make my next move. No doubt it makes the front look cleaner, but now I'm getting MADDDD AIRFLOW For DA TWIN TURBO....jk

totally the inverse of what I offered as a questioning and suggestion.

Ah...something to look forward to on my J. Thanks for the heads up. Oddly enough have not seen that happen on anything around here.

interesting build !

totally the inverse of what I offered as a questioning and suggestion.

Oh, you're on to something. Somebody on the Jbody forum did exactly that by keeping the stock turn signals in place. It works, but it also pushes the grill forward since it'll sit on top of the lamps. Makes the fit kind of weird.
The pic resolution is pretty low:

interesting build !

Thanks, the hard part besides finding time to do stuff is finding a balance between this and the Beretta.

LED bulbs into a modified "shallow" turn sig housing?

LED bulbs into a modified "shallow" turn sig housing?

That's way more effort than what I would like to do. I'm trying to keep this easy with minimal work. I just ended up spray painting the grill back to black and putting that sucker on.