D88-90: Firewall v2 + Unpowered Brakes

I haven't had a chance to post from the last few days in the garage, so here's a quick update. I've wanted to redo the upper firewall for the driver side since the first one went in. Here is my second go around. I think it turned out much cleaner. I also moved the mount for the steering shaft up a little bit to simplify the final weld and move the steering u-joint away from the engine mount.

After removing the brake booster, the master cylinder sat a little close to the firewall. I build a "shim" to move it out by about 3/8".

Here is the new firewall with everything attached. I'm so much happier with the way this version turned out.

With the brake booster removed, I had to shorten the push rod from the pedal to the master cylinder. Here is the shortened version.

Below is the brake pedal with the new push rod installed. Now I just need to figure out how to make sure that the brake pedal doesn't swing back and the push rod come out. This was all held in place by brake booster before. Oh, and I hope that I don't need that booster. Ha.

D58:Pedal Mounting D3

With the pedal firewall mount assembled, it wass time to get it mounted in the frame. The first issue that I came across was that I cut the sheet too small and there wasn't any overlap on the frame. I'm realizing that one of the issues with using flux core wire and no shielding gas is welding any thin gauge sheet is almost impossible without burning through every quarter inch. Frustrating! To remedy this, I framed out the frame where the firewall sheet will be mounted. The beginning of this frame is shown below.

Next problem was that I needed to mount the brake booster higher than I thought to clear the frame. The additional height that I added when building the 15 degree angle on top of the pedal box was about 1/4" too low, of course. Easy fix, just cut out a notch to fit the pedal assembly mount.

Below is the firewall sheet mocked up to show the final assembly and make sure everything fits before making the rest of the frame changes.

Finally, the whole pedal assembly installed to show the brake booster in place along with the pedal mount and clutch master cylinder. There will need to be some additional changes to the frame to fill in the space on the bottom half of the firewall sheet along with adding some more support to the firewall.

D56-57:Pedal Mounting D1/2

I spent the last couple of days working on the pedal assembly and getting the factory pedals mounted in the frame. The first change needed was angling the mount about 15 degrees to replicate the factory mounting of the brake booster and master cylinder. In the first two pics are the modifications made to the frame to achieve this angle.

The next step was integrating the original mounting plates into the new firewall. Below is the firewall from the BMW that will be used instead of recreating it in new sheet metal. The original plan was to make the new firewall a single piece. After mocking everything up, it was obvious that another solution would be needed.

The new solution is a 2 piece solution. The top half of the firewall to mount the pedal assembly and then add the bottom half as a separate piece. Below is the top half with original firewall wall piece and the new firewall separate...

...and then on top of each other which will be the final assembly. Reusing the original means I don't need to go out an buy all the necessary hole saws to replicate the original. I'm trying to keep this as low cost as possible.

D54:Engine Install + Pedal Assembly

I've finally moved the frame off the build table and onto jack stands for the rest of assembly. Below you can see the engine is back in with the modified engine and transmission mounts.

The parts are finally coming out of boxes and below is the pedal assembly. I'm hoping this is one of the next things to get installed. Depending on how high I can mount the pedals, I may not need to shorten them at all, but that is yet to be determined. I also need to figure out if the brakes will be too "strong" since they were designed for a car that weighed almost 3 times what this one will. Again... TBD.