TSiAWD666
Supporting Vendor
- 2,648
- 899
- Aug 15, 2003
-
Herndon,
Virginia
I just had installed some new carbon fiber doors and mirrors along with lexan windows on my track car. I figured some folks might find information about it useful so here I am sharing. Pardon the picture quality but I was snapping things quickly as I had to get the car to another shop for other work, and it seems I had some crap on the phone's lens
The doors are from Advan Carbon in CA. They are the only place I could find selling doors for our cars (other than a certain less than reputable vendor here who I won't name). I called them up, they answered all my questions and were very nice, and after I paid they had them shipped out in two business days, and arriving to the east coast in four. Very awesome company and service. Not cheap though... $1400 + $150 shipping. Ouch!
Now the doors were built to replace OEM doors, so they had the skeleton for speakers and things, but I had that cut out as much as possible to save weight. Doing so made the doors fairly flimsy but still functional. The door fitment, per my body guys, was really crappy. Initially they were way too far forward and all sorts of oriented funny. They had to remove the door hinges from the car and slot them in various ways to kind of get them to fit. In the end the rear lower corner is pushed outwards just a bit and that can't be fixed without lots of body work. On my car it's not a big deal as my aero body panels kinda mask it (and it's a race car after all) so it's good enough. Other than that issue they are pretty nice, with great finish, consistency in the carbon fiber (which you can't see since I painted over it), and a nice oem-like skeleton. Oh, they are fairly light in at about the 18lbs. range as delivered (much lighter now, but we didn't measure them after cutting everything and installing the door handles/latch). The OEM doors with windows are crazy heavy, maybe like 80lbs? total guess but they are really heavy
I had them come up with a pull cable door release to replace the oem interior door handle since I didn't want to keep all that (I would have had to keep a lot more of the skeleton for it to work). They used cable running through fuel line piping that is riveted behind the upper edge of the fiberglass door frame, and looped around and crimped, with I think rubber hose over the cable loop. It's really slick and works perfectly!
The mirrors are APR's Formula GT3 universal set. They install fairly easily to the oem mount with some widening of some mounting holes. Originally I was going to mount them to the doors like Andrew Brilliant does on his car, but my body guys were very wary of the thin door skins supporting them and these mount points ended up looking ok. The mirrors give you barely any vision on the sides but at least they give some The passenger side is slightly obscured by the OEM mounting triangle panels but it's about 90% still in view from my driver's seat. Keep in mind my driver's seat is much lower and further back than an OEM one though so don't use these comments to guide your installation.
The original plan was to use Angry Aero's mirror delete panels to fill the void of the removed OEM mirrors, but since we put the new mirrors in the same area we used the Angry Aero mirror delete panels underneath. So about these mirror deletes.... I'm sorry but they are absolute shit. They are shaped ABS covered in carbon fiber vinyl. They are not cut to shape to fill the void of the oem mirrors like they should be. We will be yanking these and just painting some lexan on a later visit. What a waste of $80 (I think that's what I paid). Now for a drag car that doesn't care about nice fitment and just wants something yeah, these do the job, but not an $80 job.
So while the car is now a trailer queen most of the time, I wanted to make sure for transport I had some windows in place that were removable for the track, but also for when I need to drive the car a short distance for something (because loading/unloading a trailer is a PITA for a 5 mile trip). So I asked them to come up with removable windows. I had originally asked them to explore doing what many race car guys do which is use the OEM window with a large U-shaped bracket so that the window sits on the door frame, and can just be slide upwards and out when removing. Since I was going to drive too I asked that we be able to secure them, like with dzus fasteners or something. Here's an example of what I had thought would work:
Well once the body guys dug into it we found the fiberglass frame was way too flimsy for the OEM glass and we had to come up with something else. I picked up some Home Depot Racing Lexan ($100 for a huge sheet), some Car Quest Racing fuel line, and some aluminum rivets, and I'll be damned but they built me some nice removable lexan windows Before:
After:
They used the fuel line as framing material, and riveted the lexan to it. Now they didn't do exactly as I asked which was to heat the lexan and form it to the OEM window shape, but they don't think it would have helped much because of how thin the lexan was (HDR didn't really have thicker). As they are they fall a bit concave when sitting on the car but they do their job so I think I'll let that go. As you can see they shaped the lexan nicely, even smoothing over the edges, and gave it a nice painted border. They are held in by nuts that go over two studs epoxied to the inside door skin. The lexan has two holes cut that go over the studs. By forming everything just right and screwing on the nuts to hold the lexan into place I get just enough pressure on the door frame to keep water out. They do kind of sag when the door is opened but who cares. The system requires just a little adjustment when reinstalling the windows but it only takes maybe a minute so it works pretty well. It'll do.
Well, I'm not sure what else to share so feel free to ask any questions. My first race with this is Apr 26/27 so we'll see how they hold up I still gotta get the numbers/class/sponsor stickers back on the door along with a bunch of other crap so it's a mad scramble, but at least this particular project looks to be done
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The doors are from Advan Carbon in CA. They are the only place I could find selling doors for our cars (other than a certain less than reputable vendor here who I won't name). I called them up, they answered all my questions and were very nice, and after I paid they had them shipped out in two business days, and arriving to the east coast in four. Very awesome company and service. Not cheap though... $1400 + $150 shipping. Ouch!
You must be logged in to view this image or video.
Now the doors were built to replace OEM doors, so they had the skeleton for speakers and things, but I had that cut out as much as possible to save weight. Doing so made the doors fairly flimsy but still functional. The door fitment, per my body guys, was really crappy. Initially they were way too far forward and all sorts of oriented funny. They had to remove the door hinges from the car and slot them in various ways to kind of get them to fit. In the end the rear lower corner is pushed outwards just a bit and that can't be fixed without lots of body work. On my car it's not a big deal as my aero body panels kinda mask it (and it's a race car after all) so it's good enough. Other than that issue they are pretty nice, with great finish, consistency in the carbon fiber (which you can't see since I painted over it), and a nice oem-like skeleton. Oh, they are fairly light in at about the 18lbs. range as delivered (much lighter now, but we didn't measure them after cutting everything and installing the door handles/latch). The OEM doors with windows are crazy heavy, maybe like 80lbs? total guess but they are really heavy
You must be logged in to view this image or video.
I had them come up with a pull cable door release to replace the oem interior door handle since I didn't want to keep all that (I would have had to keep a lot more of the skeleton for it to work). They used cable running through fuel line piping that is riveted behind the upper edge of the fiberglass door frame, and looped around and crimped, with I think rubber hose over the cable loop. It's really slick and works perfectly!
You must be logged in to view this image or video.
The mirrors are APR's Formula GT3 universal set. They install fairly easily to the oem mount with some widening of some mounting holes. Originally I was going to mount them to the doors like Andrew Brilliant does on his car, but my body guys were very wary of the thin door skins supporting them and these mount points ended up looking ok. The mirrors give you barely any vision on the sides but at least they give some The passenger side is slightly obscured by the OEM mounting triangle panels but it's about 90% still in view from my driver's seat. Keep in mind my driver's seat is much lower and further back than an OEM one though so don't use these comments to guide your installation.
You must be logged in to view this image or video.
You must be logged in to view this image or video.
The original plan was to use Angry Aero's mirror delete panels to fill the void of the removed OEM mirrors, but since we put the new mirrors in the same area we used the Angry Aero mirror delete panels underneath. So about these mirror deletes.... I'm sorry but they are absolute shit. They are shaped ABS covered in carbon fiber vinyl. They are not cut to shape to fill the void of the oem mirrors like they should be. We will be yanking these and just painting some lexan on a later visit. What a waste of $80 (I think that's what I paid). Now for a drag car that doesn't care about nice fitment and just wants something yeah, these do the job, but not an $80 job.
So while the car is now a trailer queen most of the time, I wanted to make sure for transport I had some windows in place that were removable for the track, but also for when I need to drive the car a short distance for something (because loading/unloading a trailer is a PITA for a 5 mile trip). So I asked them to come up with removable windows. I had originally asked them to explore doing what many race car guys do which is use the OEM window with a large U-shaped bracket so that the window sits on the door frame, and can just be slide upwards and out when removing. Since I was going to drive too I asked that we be able to secure them, like with dzus fasteners or something. Here's an example of what I had thought would work:
You must be logged in to view this image or video.
Well once the body guys dug into it we found the fiberglass frame was way too flimsy for the OEM glass and we had to come up with something else. I picked up some Home Depot Racing Lexan ($100 for a huge sheet), some Car Quest Racing fuel line, and some aluminum rivets, and I'll be damned but they built me some nice removable lexan windows Before:
You must be logged in to view this image or video.
After:
You must be logged in to view this image or video.
They used the fuel line as framing material, and riveted the lexan to it. Now they didn't do exactly as I asked which was to heat the lexan and form it to the OEM window shape, but they don't think it would have helped much because of how thin the lexan was (HDR didn't really have thicker). As they are they fall a bit concave when sitting on the car but they do their job so I think I'll let that go. As you can see they shaped the lexan nicely, even smoothing over the edges, and gave it a nice painted border. They are held in by nuts that go over two studs epoxied to the inside door skin. The lexan has two holes cut that go over the studs. By forming everything just right and screwing on the nuts to hold the lexan into place I get just enough pressure on the door frame to keep water out. They do kind of sag when the door is opened but who cares. The system requires just a little adjustment when reinstalling the windows but it only takes maybe a minute so it works pretty well. It'll do.
Well, I'm not sure what else to share so feel free to ask any questions. My first race with this is Apr 26/27 so we'll see how they hold up I still gotta get the numbers/class/sponsor stickers back on the door along with a bunch of other crap so it's a mad scramble, but at least this particular project looks to be done