Lachlan's MightyBoy
Posted: Tue Feb 13, 2018 6:58 pm
My youngest son Lachlan wanted a MightyBoy to play with. He has an Mitsubishi Evo Vii and a bike so this is just atoy. He found one on Facebook for $300.00. This was January 2017.
The car came almost completely dismantled with plenty of rust and no engine, gearbox, radiator or driveshafts.
What to do?
Firstly I’ve built cars for the last 50 years and have an ICV under my belt and plenty of engine swaps, plus race and rally cars, so I wasn’t too afraid to get in and have ago.
We decided it was pointless keeping it standard and thought an F8 would be the way to go. The problem was they aren’t easy to come by and most likely would be well worn and still didn’t have much power.
The solution was use a Daewoo Matiz engine and transmission as we had read Arklan’s build thread it looked pretty straight forward.
However we thought we would be a little more daring and use as much of the Matiz as we could. After all once you buy the car the bits you use are free.
In the end after a lot of measuring and discussion we opted to use the Daewoo floor, firewall and complete front structure. This would allow us to use the Matiz front suspension, all the wiring, complete unaltered power assisted brakes and we didn’t have to worry too much about making engine mounts etc. Another advantage was we could cut out the rust.
As the Matiz was built in 2004, it’s fuel injected and I would rather work with electronics than carburettors. Additionally the car is a lot more structurally stronger than the MightyBoy. The floor even incorporated side impact protection. The airbags had to be deleted. They could have been retained but the Engineer wasn’t very enthusiastic about that.
We figured if we stuffed up we didn’t stand to lose much and we could salvage some money by selling off the body panels as rough as they were.
So this is the MightyBoy we started with.
Then the Matiz arrived home on the trailer for $400.00. 1 months’s rego and a blown clutch. We did find a small bag of ice under the driver’s seat, but that was flushed down the toilet.
We commenced working on it late February 2017.
A day or so of stripping and cutting and we had the Matiz looking like this. I guess there’s no going back for the Matiz.
Another day and MightyBoy looked like this. Same deal as the Matiz, there’s no going back. I don’t think this car could have been saved as the rust in the plenum was just too extensive so we haven’t ruined a good MightyBoy, rather we’ve saved the body of one.
Funny we didn't get a photo of the MightyBoy chopped.
Hmm, they don’t fit together all that well. No trouble, just turn the floor of the Matiz up to lower the floor level by 45mm and all should be fine. We left as much of the Matiz as possible to allow us to fold sections over each other so we could both seam and plug weld the parts together. The main issue was maintaining the wheelbase and keeping the two parts aligned to ensure the caster remained within reason and that the wheels lined up.
After a bit of welding the two half-cars were one and it looked workable.
Our first real problem was the scuttle height on a Matiz is over 100mm higher than the MightyBoy. We gained 45mm in dropping the floor and simply sliced the top off the Firewall and figured we would sort it as we went.
The car came almost completely dismantled with plenty of rust and no engine, gearbox, radiator or driveshafts.
What to do?
Firstly I’ve built cars for the last 50 years and have an ICV under my belt and plenty of engine swaps, plus race and rally cars, so I wasn’t too afraid to get in and have ago.
We decided it was pointless keeping it standard and thought an F8 would be the way to go. The problem was they aren’t easy to come by and most likely would be well worn and still didn’t have much power.
The solution was use a Daewoo Matiz engine and transmission as we had read Arklan’s build thread it looked pretty straight forward.
However we thought we would be a little more daring and use as much of the Matiz as we could. After all once you buy the car the bits you use are free.
In the end after a lot of measuring and discussion we opted to use the Daewoo floor, firewall and complete front structure. This would allow us to use the Matiz front suspension, all the wiring, complete unaltered power assisted brakes and we didn’t have to worry too much about making engine mounts etc. Another advantage was we could cut out the rust.
As the Matiz was built in 2004, it’s fuel injected and I would rather work with electronics than carburettors. Additionally the car is a lot more structurally stronger than the MightyBoy. The floor even incorporated side impact protection. The airbags had to be deleted. They could have been retained but the Engineer wasn’t very enthusiastic about that.
We figured if we stuffed up we didn’t stand to lose much and we could salvage some money by selling off the body panels as rough as they were.
So this is the MightyBoy we started with.
Then the Matiz arrived home on the trailer for $400.00. 1 months’s rego and a blown clutch. We did find a small bag of ice under the driver’s seat, but that was flushed down the toilet.
We commenced working on it late February 2017.
A day or so of stripping and cutting and we had the Matiz looking like this. I guess there’s no going back for the Matiz.
Another day and MightyBoy looked like this. Same deal as the Matiz, there’s no going back. I don’t think this car could have been saved as the rust in the plenum was just too extensive so we haven’t ruined a good MightyBoy, rather we’ve saved the body of one.
Funny we didn't get a photo of the MightyBoy chopped.
Hmm, they don’t fit together all that well. No trouble, just turn the floor of the Matiz up to lower the floor level by 45mm and all should be fine. We left as much of the Matiz as possible to allow us to fold sections over each other so we could both seam and plug weld the parts together. The main issue was maintaining the wheelbase and keeping the two parts aligned to ensure the caster remained within reason and that the wheels lined up.
After a bit of welding the two half-cars were one and it looked workable.
Our first real problem was the scuttle height on a Matiz is over 100mm higher than the MightyBoy. We gained 45mm in dropping the floor and simply sliced the top off the Firewall and figured we would sort it as we went.