Hey guys!

My name is Andreas... I've been around here for a while but haven't been very active lately while doing my studies...

I'm an industrial design student doing my third and last year at Umeå institute of Design in northern Sweden...
I own a 82' Firebird S/E since about 9 years back.. The car has been going thru a lot of modifications... Engine, drivetrain, handling, etc.

This is a project which never seem to end... Like for many other car enthusiast here the driving force is to learn things and use our creativity to solve problems or express our selves... Rather then driving the damn car... Well that's of course the big dream... Cruising down the street with a custom designed bird hearing the V8 spinning while playin' some rock n roll music...

The project

My goal is to refine / design the bird as a street legal car with some custom modifications. The biggest challenge is to build a custom interior, which includes door panels, dash board, instrumentation, center console, speaker system and so on. I'm also having ideas of creating a custom interaction system for the car where the driver will be able to control many functions digitally by touchscreens. The vision is to create a modern knight rider... With less pinball feeling then the original spaceship... This will be more sleek and timeless...

I would like to share my design process and some of my thoughts with you. Sign up for email subscription on my homepage.
http://projectrefine.com/

I hope that I can give you some inspiration from my perspective as a future industrial designer... This project is not really what we're working with in general, we're more working hands on with products for the industries but our creative processes can be used very much in a project like this...

This thread

The thread is for me to share knowledge with you about design process, methods for modeling and so on... But I will mainly do updates on my homepage because of time issues

I will need some help from you in choosing the right insulation, carpets, what to think of when building a decent stereo system and so on...

I'll get back to you about this for later... Hoping to also find the time to search thru this board for answers instead of bringing up to many already existing questions. But this thread could be a good way for anybody doing parts of a complete interior rebuild. Trying to keep it as clean as possible.

People with much experience in building sound systems for this kind of cars please send me a pm...

Regards from a cold Sweden!

 

Hmmm... this seems like it'll be interesting. I'm interested in seeing your ongoing progress with this project.

 

I'm also interested in seeing how this turns out. Good luck!

 

Finally!! I've been waiting for someone to do an actual custom interior! This looks really interesting. I hope you actually build something like this, should be really cool.

 

$$$$$$$$$$$$$

CAN-Bus will probably be your best bet with something like this if you want to have everything integrated into a touch screen system with different displays and readouts like a true modern-day KITT would be. I'm definitely subscribing to this.

 

Interesting...the 88 Z51/89 Corvette wheels don't look bad on the car!

 

thanks for your support guys!

The Can-bus system will be interesting to look closer into.. If you know about any projects that can be of help please share with me..

Its intensive in school... working on my degree project - a control unit for smaller electrical hybrid engines. I'm doing my research right now which gives me another reason for looking into control systems.

The bird will not be my highest priority at this moment... but I'll try to keep the thread alive and work parallel with my other projects..
Cheers

 

I am definitely interested to see where this goes. Best of luck.

 

This is going to be pretty awesome!

 

What is a Can-bus???

 

Here's some information about Can-bus:
http://canbuskit.com/what.php