[Mr.Fixit]

I've had the displeasure of working on afew of the "turnkey minus" cars put together by Johnex in an attempt to compete with SPF. The car uses expanding aerosol spray foam as a major structural joining compound. The foot box for the driver is patched together wth cardboard in the region where they notched it out to clear the headers. They just glue aluminized heat barrier over the whole engine bay and cover it all up. The rollbar is not centered with the driver, but rather offset. The headers are complete crap.. Thin gauge metal, bad welds, warped flanges, crimping marks from where they clamped the pipes in a muffler shop pipe bender, and no collector gaskets supplied to match their custom sidepipe flanges. The positive battery cable is constucted into the car: disappearing into the expanding foam and reappearing in the engine bay. Not at all removable. You could see the weave of the fiberglass printing through the paint. No travel limiters on the rear suspension on the EQ so the rear halfshafts are allowed to droop lower than the point where they start to bind up. Sidepipes that have removable tips, that always loosen themselves up because you cannot tighten the forward junction of the threaded rod which holds it all together, and you must pack with fiberglass yourself. The gas pedal requires a custom added pedal stop or changing the pedal ratio in order to make it not have slack at the first part of travel (the pedal has more travel than holley or most other carbs, so it's slack up front, or over-tension at full throttle). The fan circuit requires an additional diode to prevent it feeding current back to the ignition circuit (allowing the car to keep running) after turning the key off. They need a huge stack of shims on the front cross shaft to get them to align correctly. They can't run very sizable tires up front or out back comparitively to other brands. The hood prop rod is positioned 2" above the primary pipes of the headers so it's always too hot to touch. I could keep going on like this, but you all get my inpression of the Johnex "turnkey minus" cars built at John's shop by his people.