My first project! I need help!!
Posted by TheRookie
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Longish post ahead; I'd like to think it's worth reading though, and I'm probably going to give you as many answers as you're going to get.
Okay, if you came to this forum expecting everyone to get onboard and congratulate you on what a beautiful and unique butterfly you're being for having this idea, and then hand you a step by step instruction list on how to do any variant of this, you came to the wrong forum. The first of those, you could get from most other forums populated by people who don't do anything more ambitious than boltons, the second you're not going to get from anyone who isn't trying to sell you something. You've laid out a desire to do what would be a pretty ambitious (and yes, cool) project even for someone who has been doing this shit for quite a while, one that would easily take years of dedicated effort, and all we have gotten regarding your skill level is reference to it being your first project, and a series of what sound to the more experienced like the "wrong" questions. This has been guiding their responses, because I think most of us here know full well what it's like to be in over your head on a project that started out being really ambitious and cool but maybe not fully thought out. There's also a temptation to take the easy route and assume it's hopeless for you, as that involves a lot less typing. 
All that said, noone here or anywhere else is going to be able to tell you what all you need to do. There's many ways to do this, and many choices you can make along the way. I'm going to detail a few variations on how I see it being possible to get this done. This is making no assumptions about your skill level; these would be choices that a fully equipped shop would have to choose from. First question you have to answer for yourself is what the driveline is going to come from. As I see it you have the choice between some sort of Mitsubishi AWD car or the Sierra Cosworth. The Mitsu option has the advantage of being available in this country really easily, the Ford option has the advantage of having the right name on the valvecover and being a bit cooler because it's not available over here. There's more options if you're willing to butcher a transaxle and mess with adapter plates and fabricated or billet parts, but that's a hassle; we can address that if you really want but enh. Next, there's a few more drivelines that are options if automatic transmissions are an option, but then why bother? There's also a few more AWD donors that won't work in any sane, intelligent way; Audis and Subarus for example. Next question is if you have the knowledge to redesign the suspension geometry from scratch. If you do, do so; it gives you a lot more freedom in how everything else bolts up because you're not tied to whatever compromises the OEM your donor came from made to make shit bolt up easily on a production line. If you don't, use all the suspension crap from the donor car in the same orientation and location that it was in the donor car. This can mean making a lot of measurements, or using big chunks of the donor car's sheetmetal. We'll get to that. Now, all the rest. I'm going to order these in order I see preferable (this is my preferences, yours may differ) There's potential for blending between the options, I'm just drawing arbitrary lines between them to make them distinct. I'm also going to assume you want something that at least has the potential to go fast and actually work right; if not there's all sorts of really hackjob ways that will be safe enough to push on and off a trailer at car shows and look sorta right. First option is, you can make a tube chassis to mount the suspension and driveline from the donor vehicle (using the stock subframes and matching the geometry, or using new geometry, whichever) and pull molds from the Focus to make a fiberglass body. Add sheetmetal wherever necessary to mount the interior from the Focus, and so on. Done right, this will be the lightest, fastest, stiffest option. It's also going to be closest to a pure race car, and will look less stock than the other options. It will probably also have tubes resembling a roll cage around the roof area (because they have to support the roof panels) so may not be comfortable on the street. Second option is to do the same option for the tube chassis and then cram the Focus sheetmetal around it. Think, fundamentally, cutting the car in half down the centerline, cutting away all the parts of the car that don't fit around the tube chassis, then welding it back together around, and also to, the tube chassis. The Focus sheetmetal will no longer have to take suspension loads, so quite a bit of it can be cut away. If you plan it right you can also use the upper structure from the Focus (pillars and roof and whatnot) and avoid the need to have cage-like tubes up there. This option has the potential to be as stiff as the previous option, while being easier to get the stock interior, glass, etc into. Third, the simplest option is to make new front and rear subframes to take the Mitsu driveline and suspension stuff. Copy the Mitsu suspension mount points and geometry onto something made out of tubes that bolts to the Focus body. You will probably have to hack up the rear of the Focus to add shock towers to fit the Mitsu shocks, but that's not a big deal comparatively. You may have to hack up some of the floorpan to fit the driveshaft. The thing is that while this is the simplest option, it probably won't be the easiest because you have to try to make everything fit to the Focus chassis. If the donor car suspension goes someplace the Focus has something structural, you have to plan out where to cut, weld, and add metal until it's properly structural again. It's a headache, whereas with the previous options you can pretty much just make anything sheetmetal get out of the way without handling/safety consequences. Fourth option is to graft the entire floorpan from the donor car, including shock towers and whatnot, into the Focus. This is fundamentally how the Escort Cosworths were made. Think of this like option 2, except the floorpan, shock towers, lower rails, etc are the tube chassis if you take my meaning. It has the potential to be the most OEM-like option, but the catch is that when Ford made the Escort Cosworth, they had blueprints of both cars detailing where all the structural parts of the sheetmetal are, and you won't. So there'll be a lot of screwing around with sheetmetal to get everything to line up and have enough structural support to not be floppy, and in the end it will probably need enough tube reinforcement that it will morph into the previous option by the time it's stiff 'enough'. And that's about it. There's no swap kit, nothing off the shelf that will do the hard parts of the job, no easy solutions. You said in the initial post you don't want to spend money to do something that won't work; well, anything is possible to make work with enough time and effort, and we all know that, so nobody wants to say it's not possible because it's provably wrong. It's just, the amount of work to do it anywhere near right is enormous. |
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