The car is based around a central rigid tube section with the suspension and powertrain components mounted to it. It's built with a mix of parts scrounged from a C4 Corvette and hand fabricated wooden component. The process of building the wood parts seems to be to create a mold of the part, and then laminate layers of veneer into a sort of structural three dimensional plywood. Now, plywood, as you woodworkers know, is a spectacular natural building material. Because it's constructed with the wood grain at perpendicular angles, it is dimensionally stable, rigid, and if made as watertight as a beaver's fecal-delivery hole, remains extremely strong while also retaining a great deal of flexibility.

After following the team's progress on their blog and photos, we're fairly impressed with not only the quality of the work, but the engineering prowess of the designs. The only concern we have is the placement of the steering rack, the rack ends and the compression strength of the wooden tie rods. From where we sit — behind our comfortable desk many miles away — the suspension seems like it will produce positively massive bumpsteer (the rod ends seem like they will fall out of plane with the A-arm mounting points and cross the plane of the upper A-arm) but maybe there's a trick we're not seeing.

The engine is fascination incarnate. These madmen are starting with a Northstar V8 and running it backwards, turning the exhaust and intake sides around. The intakes will be underneath the cylinder banks, fed by two roots superchargers through individual intercoolers and then up into the combustion chambers. The exhaust continues out through the top of the engine through an all-custom exhaust manifold and then out the back. Nobody is going to accuse these guys of thinking small.

When complete, we're fairly certain it'll be an attractive Maple-and-Oak-machine, and it may even work — as long as they can keep those under-hood temperatures under control. It would be terrible for them to put in all this work and then have it go all Audi R8 on them. We look forward to seeing this baby finished — maybe we'll even take a drive down and play in the sawdust. [JoeHarmonDesign]

We're going to pull our punches here and choose a V8 that's not only fairly small for a DOHC unit but already set up for a front-wheel-drive application. That means the engine and associated transaxles are already lined up in correct orientation in the recipient cars' chassis. So whip out $1,600 and drop a Buy It Now bomb on this 300-horse late-90s Northstar engine, then head to the junkyard for some transaxle shopping fun.

You won't be the first lunatic ambitious project builder to take on the Northstar Fiero project. Far from it- why, it's been done many times! Here's a guy who makes the whole process look pretty straightforward. You can keep repeating to yourself the mantra "GM engine... GM car... easy swap..." as you head on down to pick up this very reasonably priced '84 Fiero (go here if the ad disappears). Only 400 bucks asking price! You can go ahead and make plans to have your new 300-horsepower Fiero terrorizing your town on the very same weekend, that's how easy it's sure to be... well, actually, you might need to spend some time fixing brakes and stuff, since the car has been sitting for "5 or 6" years (probable translation: 10 or 12 years). So let's say two weekends, tops!

Isn't it cheating to swap in an engine made by the same corporation that made the car? The Northstar might even bolt up to a GM transmission that fits perfectly in the Fiero, and where's the fun there? Not only that, the Fiero came with a V6 from the factory, which means there's room for a somewhat wide engine. That's why you need to spring for an extra hundred bucks and buy this '86 Toyota MR2 (go here if the ad disappears). Dad says it's gotta go, and when Orange County dads say it's gotta go, they mean it! All we know about the car is that it "NEEDS WORK," because the owner, Steve, needs to repeat his phone number four times and runs out of motivation for describing the car itself; hey, it works on radio ads, so why shouldn't it be even more effective in print? You might think that shoehorning a Northstar into an MR2 would be damn near impossible, what with the fact that the little Toyota came with only an inline-four engine and all, but it's been done! With 300 horsepower (or more, since you might as well add supercharging to this already-hopeless challenging project), your MR2 should have the kind of power-to-weight ratio seen only on racetracks (and in car-crash stories that make the national news).

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It's not often when the closing of loopholes reveals good news for a company. In Cadillac's case, it resulted in a horsepower bump for its 4.4-liter supercharged Northstar V8. GM announced back in April it was the first automaker to follow the SAE's new voluntary, third-party power and torque testing and certification procedure, which was designed to eliminate automakers' use of "best-case" scenarios when rating horsepower, making the results more likely to be repeatable in the smoggy, humid environs of the real world. For the Chevrolet Corvette Z06, the first GM car to be tested using the new procedure, the result were a rating of 505hp from its 7.0-liter powerplant. In the case of the Cadillac STS-V, the SAE results topped GM's estimated figure of 440hp, with ratings of 469hp at 6,400 rpm and 439ft/lbs of torque at 3,900 rpm.

2006 STS-V Reaches New Performance Level [Dubspeed Racing]

Related:
Cadillac STS-V: Closer Still to the Autobahn [internal]