Million Dollar Skunksworks Kirkham

[David Kirkham]

Chris Cindrich posts here on CC as acindrich. He is my brother-in-law and is also David "Sandwich" Cindrich's brother. They come from an extraordinarily talented family. Chris did the CAD work on the car. Chris went with me on my first trip to Poland almost 15 years ago now. He has a custom made Kirkham 289 car.

[David Kirkham]

David Cindrich literally made tons of chips during this project.

[David Kirkham]

Thomas learned to read by picking up our father's copies of "Hot Rod Magazine."

[David Kirkham]

Here is a very rare picture of the inside of the factory in Poland when we first arrived. Notice the lights were out.

All the guards had machine guns at the doors. They assigned a special security guard to follow us around the factory. I will never forget seeing row upon row upon row of silent machines with their operators standing behind them--waiting for someone, anyone, to give them work. That was the end of the road of socialism.

[David Kirkham]

Finally, a picture of me. I will post another chapter tomorrow.

[RedBarchetta]

Originally Posted by David Kirkham

"...Our electric supercar..."

Did I miss a previous scoop, or is this it in real time?!?

-Dean

[David Kirkham]

Some of you may already know, but I play the piano. I really only play Chopin. (I do play Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata as an exception). I really liked one of Chopin's quotes for the design of the car. Chopin use of "slur" refers to a section of music that is played very smoothly and deftly together so the notes all blend together. It is diabolically difficult to actually achieve in practice. Chopin's use of the word in English is doubly interesting.

I knew if we "slurred" over the suspension design, it would come back to haunt us.

[1ntCobra]

Electric Supercar? Looks like you let another skunkworks picture slip out into public view.

[4pipes]

Makes me even more proud to own a Kirkham.

[David Kirkham]

The pdf files are up now for the first two chapters. They are much better resolution. Click on this link

http://www.kirkhammotorsports.com/book_aoe/

Then you can click on

Introduction
Chapter 1: The Design Team

We are still cleaning up the web page, but I wanted it to get up as soon as possible.

Any problems, let me know!

David

[Mark IV]

"The Art of Engineering by David Kirham"
Dunno this "Kirham" guy............

[David Kirkham]

Fixed! Thanks!

David

[Bluedog]

David,

I may have missed it in this long thread but how did this masterpiece perform? What were the final numbers? Thanks!

[David Kirkham]

Originally Posted by Bluedog

David,

I may have missed it in this long thread but how did this masterpiece perform? What were the final numbers? Thanks!

I refer you to page 193 in the book.

"My favorite comment came from the head of the Miller Motorsports Driving School. After several hot laps, he said, “You know, with a Cobra you run out of chassis long before you run out of motor. With this car, I just kept pushing it harder and harder. I ran out of motor before I ran out of chassis. This has potential for a serious race car."

Miller Motorsports owns two of our cars and Larry Miller has several original Cobras in his collection. The drivers at the track drove all of them (ours and the originals) regularly.

David

[twobjshelbys]

Originally Posted by David Kirkham

Miller Motorsports owns two of our cars and Larry Miller has several original Cobras in his collection. The drivers at the track drove all of them (ours and the originals) regularly.

David

That's a severe understatement. Larry (RIP) owned my favorite - CSX2299 Daytona Coupe #13.



And this "daily racer"


from the placard must be Bill's favorite car:



RIP Larry. He probably had more passion about these cars than anyone.

[David Kirkham]

Chris needed many parts digitized so they could be put in the chassis. Parts like the seats, engine, transmission, differential, wheels, etc. couldn't change so they had to be put in the car from the beginning to make sure everything fit together.

[David Kirkham]

Here we taped out a grid on our fiberglass master tool. Everywhere the tape crosses and forms an "X" we took a point and placed it into the computer as a 3 dimensional coordinate. The points were then stitched together to make a surface. Maya was used to do the surface work.

[David Kirkham]

Larry gave us complete freedom of design with the car. We knew handling was the most important part of the car to us because we knew Larry was going to drive his car--not just look at it. We took the digitized body and placed it in space over the 4 wheels. We weren't going to change the wheels or the body so they had to say exactly as they were.

We then put in the engine, transmission, differential, and seats. From there, we were free to design what ever we wanted. We started by designing the suspension. When we had it as perfect as we could get it, we simply made the frame go out and pick up the suspension points where ever they were.

[David Kirkham]

Chris pulled his hair out searching for thousandths of an inch in the kinematics of the suspension. Everything was done to an unbelievable amount of detail so nothing would come back to bite us in the end. Testing of the car proved Thomas' suspension design right. The number crunching on a project like this is pretty incredible.

[David Kirkham]

We moved the suspension completely though all of the movements to check the kinematics. You can see we designed the suspension with stick models until all the numbers were right.