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Next the huge Veilside wing, airdam and sideskirts were removed. The front Veilside carbon airdam had a crack and needed to be replaced anyway. Aero kits are a matter of personal taste and we have never really been fond of Veilside’s stuff. We wanted something race car functional. We will get to this point later. The big heavy 19 inch chrome wheels had to go. Not only were they heavy but they did not have the Super Taikyu racer look we had envisioned for the car. We needed to find something really different for our project.
The Building Process Starts
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| Our RE30’s are awesome looking and really give the car purposeful look. They were much lighter than our 19 chromies and you could feel the difference in acceleration |
Although it is not much we guess its worth mentioning. The first thing we did to project EVO is to go to our local tint shop and tint our windows. We used medium tint for our side windows and dark for our rear window, our sunroof and our border tint. We used scratchproof tint with a lifetime guarantee. We guess you could probably do this sort of thing no matter where you are.
We really disliked the phat chrome wheels that came with our car. Wheel choice is a very personal matter. What’s cool to one person might not be to someone else and these wheels did not match our cars hardcore performance theme. Volk came to our rescue with a set of their brand new hotter than hot pre production RE30 wheels. The RE30 shares technology with Volk’s new F1 wheel. If you didn’t know, Volk has been selected as the wheel supplier for the Williams F1 team and has poured plenty of time into Finite Element Analysis to hone the design of the F1 wheel. Much of what was learned in the development of this wheel went into the design of the RE30.
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| FEA Diagram- FEA pictures areas of stress concentration in shades of colors, warmer colors, like reds, oranges and yellows indicate areas of high stress. You can tell that the RE30 is an excellent design as there are no hot spots. All of the colors represented in the FEA output are cool shades of blue and green. |
This technology sharing has allowed Volk to come out with a wheel that is 30% stiffer than the legendary TE37 with about the same weight as the feathery light CE28N. The additional stiffness comes into play by improving steering feel and response, important when using sticky tires that put added strain on the wheel. The stiffness and strength will be appreciated when we subject the wheel to our planned track use. Unlike the typical cast alloy wheel, the RE30 is forged from one piece of billet. Forging is usually reserved for parts that must be very strong, like racing pistons or suspension arms. With forging, a piece of aluminum alloy is smashed in a die in the shape of the wheel with about 15,000 tons, literally smashing the aluminum into the wheels final shape. This violent force cold works the metal refining its grain to make it much denser, tougher, more ductile and stronger. The process also causes the metals grain to flow around the wheels shape, aligning it which the direction of stress giving the wheel more strength where it’s needed.
