Project Lexus SC300 Road Racer: Part 5 – Placement Makes Perfect

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Once all the holes are drilled, the bends are made, the edges cleaned, and a few test fits attempted, the final product is temporarily bolted into place.
Look at the pretty shiny mounting panel with the space for the datalogger (that shouldn’t be there) and the extra mounting holes.

Well, you can’t always be perfect. Fortunately it’s nothing a little welding can’t fix. At least it makes for a good story! You can also see Haltech’s CAN hub, which will make it easy to connect all of the CAN devices together. Just plug them all in with their own cables and you’re all set. Haltech provides a full assortment of CAN cables in different lengths.

 

Since all of the components were laid out, their mounting hole locations could be marked, punched, and drilled.

Not all of the Haltech equipment has a mounting hole, so heavy-duty hook/loop strip will be used. These type of adhesives are wear items, and should be regularly inspected. Who wants an ignitor flying around the cabin on track? Brackets could have been fabricated for every component, but that’s a little much.

 

The Elite 2500 ECU is bolted to the panel on anti-vibration mounts.

Well, they’re really just small grommets, but they work great as vibration dampeners, too. All of the bolted components use these grommets between the component and the panel. The hook/loop attached units do not, as their adhesive strips and the hook/loop itself acts to reduce vibrations a little. This step likely isn’t critical, but it sure goes a long way to help ensure reliability for the long haul. A few seconds and a few bucks here and there makes for a much better race car and final product. A little attention to detail never lost a race, right?

On to the next project!

 

While the XS Power S925 battery weighs only 23.54 lbs, it still weighs something. And, since we are building a road racing car that we want to handle well, we want to try to get weight as low and as centered in the car as possible.

This location right next to the transmission tunnel and behind the passenger seat is as good as any. It’s also fairly flat. But it doesn’t have any good mounting holes in it, so we need to fix that.

 

The first step is to drill out this factory mounting tab for… something. The SC300 didn’t have most of the interior when I bought it, so I couldn’t even tell you what the factory attached here. It doesn’t really matter, though, because it is being eliminated.

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