Things that would have made the book better

[alga]

First of all, thanks Chris for all the hard work designing the roadster and putting the book together. It's great. However, I have caught myself looking for certain curious pieces of information that aren't in the book.

First of all, a general draft of a complete roadster would be useful. What are the overall dimensions? What are the front and rear track and wheelbase? This info would be useful, e.g., when planning parking space for the roadster in a cramped garage.

Then, it would be interesting to know what to expect in terms of performance, if we go 100% by the book. What was the prototype's curb weight? What sort of acceleration it had with a standard Pinto (0-62 mph and 1/4 mile)?

In the book there's a lot of background info on various processes such as MIG welding, GRP, painwork, etc. I think at least minimal advice on metalworking technology would be very useful. E.g., recently there's been a thread on this forum about methods for cutting tubes. What is a sane choice if one has just the tools suggested in the book -- an angle grinder and a hacksaw? Would one cut all the pipes manually, or would a handheld angle grinder with a cutting disk be good enough? Then, what about the 24 suspension brackets? That's the best way to fabricate them? What about the 10 mm rear upright plates?

There are mentions of alternative donors, but what are the actual dimensions of relevant parts and assemblies, e.g. Sierra diff and rear driveshafts? There is some information about making GRP nosecone and wings, but what are the usual dimensions for these things? How high does the nosecone usually stick out above the upper rails?

Finally, the roadster has been designed in a CAD, so software readable drawings could theoretically be made available for people to download, explore and modify. Frankly, that's what I expected to find here when I first learned about this forum. In my field, computer programming, it's customary for a book author or publisher to offer all the code examples given in a book as a download (sometimes a CD-ROM tacked to the back cover), so that people do not have to type the examples from paper. What has happened here instead is that people started recreating CAD drawings from paper and then sharing them on the forum.

Luckily, thanks to this forum, most of these questions and ideas can be addressed long after the book has gone to press, and some of them already have.