In the past few weeks I made some time to order some carbon, do a good amount of reading on aero theories (I have a very good conceptual and practical understanding of physics in my educational background), and start putting a few things together.
Fun stuff first, I ordered all of the carbon and carbon Kevlar I plan to use for the splitter and it arrived very quickly! I also ordered some high temp and high impact epoxy resin with a 1 hour pot life. This is the same stuff that Boeing uses, and the same stuff some of the indy car builders use. It's only a 1 hr life so I will have to move very quickly, and it also requires a higher temp cure time. This resin is the only part I'm nervous about and resin is really the key to the whole thing! I bought a black commercial grade twil carbon since it was only 12$ per yard and weighs 203 grams per square meter. It will form the two base layers of structural carbon to my splitter. I also got the digital red camo carbon Kevlar, which is an absolutely beautiful product in person and really cannot be described or photographed well. It will form my top layer and should be the most durable. As I wear through it and black carbon is exposed I should be able to make repairs with my left over material!
I got the bumper off and made a cardboard air dam to start. I'm still not 100% certain how to best cut an air dam to shape that will fit the curves of the front bumper, but I traced what I had to make a basic start and it's starting to resemble a splitter!
Moving on, I got some hardware to mount up my professional awesome quick releases. It will be two u bolts per quick release with two angle brackets so that the u bolts clamp to the crash beam, the L brackets are bolted to the u bolts, and the quick releases then adjust up and down the L bracket as well as allowing the adjustment up and down the u bolt.
If anyone else plans to jump down a similar rabbit hole, I highly recommend looking at professional awesome's diy front aero page,
https://professionalawesome.com/diy-downforce/ . I did a tremendous amount of reading about a lot of other aero concepts after using their page as a starting point. There's really a lot to go down, but one of the key aspects which I didn't realize until I read about it, is that the Battle Aero wing that came with my car had endplates facing the wrong way
. The meat of the plate should always be at the front of the wing. Also, the wing shape isn't ideal, but it's not bad. It's prone to a bit more drag than a typical wing used in motorsport with data behind it, and there's a lot of improvement to be had from going to a dual element air foil, so at some point I guess I might even try my hand at a carbon wing... Pictured below is the CORRECT orientation of the endplates. This should help reduce a tremendous amount of drag and improve downforce at the outsides of the wing. This is especially needed given the width of the Z's front and rear fenders which greatly disturb the air flow underneath the ends of the air foil.
I measured out the radiator and the front grill intake as well. As it turns out the front grill intake (the functional parts not the plastic) are sized exactly 1/3rd of the surface area of the cooling stack! That's exactly how it should be! Who would have guessed nissan engineers knew what they were doing!? Now I just need to cut out the obstructive plastic and create a curved intake panel that will reach to the edges of the radiator to seal all that air in and force it through the cooling stack. With some louvres this should help keep all temps greatly in check and reduce underhood pressure at speed, which will lead to more downforce! I also plan to use the oem vertical DRL as an intake for the brake ducts. I checked and a shopvac general purpose suction end fits the size, so I may try to glue one on and see how it goes! Likely the intake will have to be downsized eventually, but that's not so hard to do...
So here's the major problem at the moment!! I bought a venturi vac to generate my vacuum suction for the resin catch which then sucks from the bag. I hooked everything up and I was missing several fittings. After a trip to home depot racing, I got all the fittings I needed and test the vac. It immediately pulled 27"hg but the cost was high... It needed a minimum 55 psi @ 3.5 cfm to maintain that vac and while my compressor can run 5cfm at 90psi, it only runs 3.5 cfm @ 165 psi and coincidentally that's where it got stuck on recharge and would run perpetually! It obviously would never get back to its 200psi full charge. There are other venturi that perform better and generate 1atm or 29"hg at only 0.5 cfm, but those cost as much as a knockoff vac pump on Amazon, so I went ahead and bought the vac pump. It should arrive this week for more testing!