2008 Bailey Blade Revised Design

(from Bailey Speed)  Blinded by the lights...

Over the past month, a lot of things have happened with the Blade. The Blade project is still going full force and now that the weather is warming up, it is picking up speed. During the past two weeks, I have been dealing with a variety of regulations for the headlights, specifically how high they were off the ground. When I first designed the car, I used a lot of information from Europes specialty car documents and a limited amount of info from the US. In the United States, it is harder to find the right information because every state has its own regulations for specialty cars. I designed the car according to the information I could find regarding headlight heights. While the car met European standards, it did not fully meet US standards and this forced me to redesign the front end and raise the headlights about 2" inches higher.

I took the opportunity to make some styling changes based on various comments and suggestions I received as a result of our recent publicity. While the first design was unique and aggressive, I could see ways I could improve it. I addressed this with the new design. The goal was to make the front end flow better with the rest of the car and keep the unique styling and aggressive looks. Feel free to let me know what you think.

As I mentioned above, progress is moving forward even with the new changes to the front end. I do not expect the modifications to take long. Luckily, when building the full scale body buck, I made it so that the front end was easily removable, as I had a slight feeling that changes might have to be made.

Tall folks can drive small sports cars, if I have anything to do with it...

The head clearance is still looking good. I have yet to add humps to the Hard Top, but once I do, there will be loads of room for us tall people. The amount of leg room is outrageous... I am 64" and can fully extend my legs on both passenger and driver sides and still not touch the fire wall.

New Corbeau FX1 seats have been test fitted in the car. These are similar to the type of seats that I imagine the car will come with in the future. I was worried that they may be too wide, but it turns out, that they fit perfect with room to spare. This is good news for folks that will want Recaro, Sparco and Cobra style racing seats. This is the style of seats I intended for the car from its conception.

Body Works...

Once the front end is back together, work on the final body shape will begin. I expect this will take a good amount of time to complete, as there will be what will seem like an endless amount of sanding and surfacing to do. But once done, it will be off to the mold makers to have molds made.

New Suspension and Chassis Design:

New development on the chassis and suspension is currently in the works by Eric Rodela. Eric is my partner in crime on this build and has an engineering background in hi tech mechanics and robotics. We are developing a new Independent Front and Rear suspension system for that chassis that will help make adjustments easy for both street driving and racing. The idea is not to over complicate the suspension and use standardized parts, but in such away to allow adjustments without having to purchase more parts or add and remove components. We should have some images of this on the next newsletter.

Website:  Bailey Blade