
Here's a '76 Corvette that I restored with my Father. It was pretty
rough when we started, but it turned out very well. It was one of
the tightest 'Vettes I have ever been in because we had a wrench on virtually
every nut and bolt in the entire car. I was in the 9th grade at the
time we rebuilt this car. I learned alot from this experience.
I learned I don't like bodywork. :-)
This is a Honda CB125 for which I fabricated the fibreglass panels below
the seat. I then painted the panels and the gas tank to match.
I was only in the tenth grade at the time. This was my first try
at making moulds and pulling fibreglass parts. I liked the paintwork
though, so I tried my snowmobile next...

This is a 1972 Raider 340 which originally was painted white. I liked
the black paint on the Honda, so I continued that trend. I guess
the red pinstripes were a bit over the top, but I was young and lacked
subtlety at the time. :-) I learned that black shows body imperfections
though, and before I was done, there were very few ripples in that paint.
After grade 13, I went to the Ontario College of Art to study Automotive
design from an aesthetic standpoint. This was a great place to learn
design, and drawing. Here's a 911 Turbo that I drew early in the
program. For more samples of my car drawings, go
here.

After Ontario College of Art, I spent a couple years working before starting
my Engineering degree at GMI. During this time, I got hooked on RX7s.
They were fun, fast (relatively) and fairly inexpensive. This was
actually my second one, which I used for autocrossing for a few years.
This car eventually sported a red & green argyle paint job like the
Mazda that won LeMans in 1991. If I ever dig up a photo of that,
I'll post it here.
During GMI, I worked as a prototype builder at Integram, which later became
Magna Seating Systems. Here is a sheet metal seat pan for a prototype
seat that I built using flat sheets of steel. The steel was worked
by cutting and welding until it looked like a single sheet of steel which
had been pressed in a punch press. This was alot of work!


One of the things I have always wanted to try on a Mazda rotary was to
design and build tuned expansion chambers such as are used on 2-stroke
engines to see if they could be made to work on a rotary. This is
the first prototype that I built for an '86 13B. These were modified
a few times and so far are producing as much power as the best conventional
exhaust system that we could find. This project is currently on the
back burner as I don't have a normally aspirated RX7 on which to test these
pipes. If I ever get another RX7 without a turbo, then I will continue
this development.
<<==BACK Questions? Ask me at Graydon@elektro.cmhnet.org