car design thread

the hood looks like corvette c8 and the rear wheel arches resemble mclaren.

 

A cane can't walk w/out assistance ...

 

@jm2 is a stylish man.

All the best,
Andrew.

 

More on this car - gotta' check out that junkyard....

The way the car came about was British Ford dealer and race team sponsor John Willment had a leftover 427 Cobra chassis, left over from earlier racing efforts. He directed his underlings (tell me, if there are “underlings” are there also “overlings”?) to go down to the junkyard and find a body for it and they came back with an aluminum body designed by Giovanni Savonuzzi and hand built by Ghia, originally fitted to a Fiat 8V chassis.

Savonuzzi did the original design for a one-off race car built by Virgil Conrero for the Mille Miglia. It was only after that race that the design was adapted for the production Fiat 8V (called 8V because Fiat mistakenly thought Ford had copyrighted the phrase “V8”)

The engine in the hodge-podge Cobra using that body later was not just a ordinary 427 but one that had been breathed on by Holman-Moody, the stock car racing folks who had also been in on Ford’s ’67 LeMans victory by running one of the GT 40 Mk. IV racing teams. The engine had twin four barrels and depending on compression and state of tune could put out 485 hp.

Some theorize the chassis tubes were extended by 5″ in the front. And the Supersonic body had to be modified to fit the chassis.

This car has been out and around for some five decades. At one point it belonged to a London policeman, that’s when it was kicking around for under $10,000.


The car has also been for sale by such notable emporiums as Rod Leach’s “Nostalgia” in England and The Checkered Flag in Marina Del Rey,CA.

In 2009 on the Club Cobra forum website Trevor Legate, a British historian, wrote

CSX3055 is currently undergoing a 2 – 3 year restoration process in the UK that might, finally, make it the car it should have been from day one. (Nobody ever took up the challenge) It needed the suspension sorted, which has been done and now the rather tacky interior is being rebuilt a per a 427, after removing some rather tacky 1970s quilted padding to the doors and dashboard.

Once it’s been painted it should emerge looking the proverbial million $$$ – and maybe it might be worth that as well. I look forward to getting some suitable snaps of the finished product, maybe this summer?

‘Tis a big fearsome beastie and definitely good, in theory, for 200mph+ (it used to start getting scary at around 130mph I’m reliably informed….)


Now the irony of all this is that, since that body was found in that junkyard, Fiat 8Vs, especially those rare ones with the Supersonic body style, have climbed toward a million dollars. And 427 Cobras with genuine CSX3000 numbers have done likewise.

So the eternal question is: what should happen to this car? Should the owner sell the body to whoever has the original 8V chassis so the two can at last be reunited happily ever after? Should the chassis have a Cobra body, hand built of aluminum using as original-as-possible formers to guide its shape? (But then it would be yet another lookalike 427 Cobra roadster…)

 

"......gotta' check out that junkyard...."

Please do that!! Pix will be required/appreciated.......

 

Is the Taurus system also performing all the surface scanning too?

Maybe you can talk about the evolution of that technology too. I remember Chrysler in the latter part of the 1970s moved their clays from the studio to a basement area for the scanning because they though the one fixed system in that room was better than they could do in the design studio. Models were known to suffer damage on that trip sometimes. Chrysler's then system was to not model minimum bend radiuses but to do that "in the tapes".

 

why? Why!? WHY?!!!!!
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That would be really cool if it was functional. But it's not, so it isn't.

All the best,
Andrew.

 

I was thinking more along the lines of what the surface scan, not the clay milling, allowed. The scanning system could kick out bad surface data like an imperfection in the clay. More accuracy in symmetry. But a really big deal was that it more accurately and quickly gave the surface lofting to the engineers for their work of structures and going to tooling. Upon graduation I was at a place that had not gone digital and we had a room full of body surface engineers work from hand cut cardboard templates doing full size engineering drawing on roll mylar.

 

Given this is turning into Alfa weekend, here is a 1939 8C 2900B I ran across by accident recently. Enjoy!

The 8C 2900B was born of Alfa's desire to continue dominating Italy's Mille Miglia race. They also needed a production car to replace the 8C 2300. Never was dual-purpose practicality more exquisitely wrought.
The 2900 chassis was that of Alfa's most recent Grand Prix car which also provided the supercharged engine. Three cars were entered in the 1936 Mille Miglia and finished in order.

A few more than thirty of the road-going 2900Bs were produced between 1937 and 1939 in two versions. Initially, the 112-inch wheelbase Corto and then the eight-inch-longer Lungo.
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Rear end reminds me a lot of this:

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Tell Adam he subconsciously picked the '76 Seville because of the future El Camino front end they appropriated!

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Wow wow wow! A perfect update on the original 240Z! That would be a huge hit.

 

Not many people are aware that Cadillac abandoned the Elky market after 204 earlier attempts (sort of).

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