Up on a Lift - Kraln's RX-8 Blog

I took the car to a diy-shop today, where you can rent lifts by the half-hour. I had three goals:

Take pictures and measurements of the various stuff in the car
Get an intuition for how things might come together, including mounting
See if I could see the exhaust leak

1 and 2 went really well, and I'll be using these pictures and measurements throughout the design process. I could not see the exhaust leak.

Depth at fuel tank

Composite of measurements

Author: kraln

Jeff Katz is an engineer and serial entrepreneur who has founded companies across a wide variety of industries including security, finance, and IT. He's worked everything from electrical engineering through firmware, cloud architecture, engineering management and CTO, for startups as well as multinationals such as Telefónica and Daimler.

About

I bought an RX-8 with the intention of converting it to run on Hydrogen. Conveniently, the hydrogen fueling network where I live was shutdown shorly after I brought the car home. After driving the car around with the original drivetrain for much longer than I originally intended, it started to lose significant power. Rather than simply replacing the existing (fun, but unreliable) drivetrain with a rebuild, or a different (boring, but more reliable) gasoline engine, I'd want to return to the original goal of making my RX-8 zero-emissions.

The goal is an RX-8 that, from the outside and inside, is indistinguishable from stock. All safety and comfort features should still work, and the car shouldn't gain too much additional weight. The original structure should stay as intact as possible, and the handling and dynamics should be as close to as-delivered. It should still be fun to drive but reliable as a daily, and it should still zoom-zoom.