Splinter Wooden Supercar Burnout Review and Specification

"Wood is a truly amazing material to work with."

Splinter Wooden Supercar Burnout Review and Specification

"It has a higher strength-to-weight ratio than aluminium or steel, and it possesses a versatility that makes many different types of construction techniques possible.

"The look, feel, and smell of a natural material like wood is not seen elsewhere and cannot be faked, and the satisfaction involved in making something from a piece of wood is awesome.

"This is a supercar designed to push boundaries and prove the potential of wood as a material."

Here are the specifications:

LAYOUT
Mid-engine, rear-drive

CHASSIS
Laminated wood veneer Monocoque

BRAKES
F 14.0in drilled, slotted, vented rotors with 6 piston calipers R 12.0in drilled, slotted, vented rotors

WHEELS
3 piece- forged rims, laminated wood center section
F 19in X 10in
R 20in X 13in

TIRES
Michelin Pilot Sport 2
F 265/35ZR19
R 335/30ZR20
STEERING
Sweet Mfg Integrated Servo 12:1 Rack and Pinion

FRONT SUSPENSION
Unequal length upper and lower laminated wood A-arms
Transversely mounted laminated wood leaf spring
Adjustable remote reservoir tube shocks
Laminated wood anti-roll bar

REAR SUSPENSION
Laminatesd wood trailing arms
Transversely mounted laminated wood leaf spring

ENGINE
Aluminum block and heads
32V DOHC reverse-flow cylinder heads
4.6L displacement
Twin Roots-type superchargers
4 air-to-water intercoolers
Projected 600 bhp

DRIVETRAIN
6 speed manual transaxle
Getrag limited-slip differential

Splinter Wooden Supercar

Yes, this is a wooden car. Forget the jokes. Anyone making more than mere decorative use of wood in an automobile has heard them all. And doesn't care. Wood is a magnificent structural material, "God's own composite," proclaimed the late Frank Costin, the brilliant technologist behind the glorious shapes of early Lotus cars, the Vanwall Formula 1 car, and-significantly-the plywood chassis of the Marcos in which a young Jim Clark won some of his first races.

Three years ago, Joe Harmon, a twenty-eight-year-old industrial design graduate student at North Carolina State University, thought it would be instructive to make a wood supercar for his master's thesis, including some of the running gear and-unlike the Marcos-all of the bodywork. "I wanted to show that wood isn't an antiquated, low-technology material," Harmon says.

To achieve Harmon's goal of a fully fluid body surface, the team had to invent a wood veneer cloth to use in place of more usual glass-fiber or carbon-fiber weaves. That meant designing and developing specific looms, acquiring rolls of veneer five inches wide, slitting it into bands sixty feet long and an eighth- or a quarter-inch wide, weaving it into cloth to place in female molds, and then vacuum bagging it with epoxy resin. Those looms-wood, of course-are works of art, using wooden clothespins machined to feed veneer strips through their jaws. With too much tension, they slipped; if there wasn't enough tension, rubber bands attached to the clothespins compensated. It was wonderfully elegant, wonderfully simple. Once it was imagined.

Those wheels represent one of the biggest unknowns. Despite a fifteen-degree conical taper meant to spread loads over more wood fibers, Harmon thinks that the massive torque of his modified Cadillac Northstar engine may rip out the centers. To get heat away from the wooden structure, he has swapped the cylinder heads left to right so the exhaust ports are inboard, with the headers coming out the top of the engine below huge vents. The transaxle is a six-speed Corvette unit, which helps push the cockpit well forward, despite the 104.8-inch wheelbase. The hull weighs about 1100 pounds, and Harmon expects the final curb weight to be approximately 2500 pounds.

© Source: automobilemag
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