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May 3, 2006
3rd Link, Night Three
Today I fabbed the brackets that attach the third link to the rear axle. The horizontal offset is 10.5" towards the passenger side. This packaging places it just beyond the edge of the gas tank. Checking the anti-squat numbers on the spreadsheet, I needed as short a link as possible, so I angled the mount 20 degrees forward. This actually places the mount through the rear firewall, so a larger access hole has to be cut. The nice part is that it leaves plenty of clearance for the fuel tank.
The A1 Racing mount needs some clearance in the rear, so the vertical tube needs to be about 3.5" in front of the main roll bar hoop, centerline to centerline.
Time to take a dinner break, and resume after some pasta...
For the rest of the evening, I fabbed the vertical bar for the front link. Usually, this would be easy, but not when half of your tools are in the new garage, and the other half, are at the old house. In this case, the base to my JD Squared mandrel bender was not here. I've got the manual version, that does not have hydraulics, so it requires a good anchor point, and a long breaker bar (about 4' works well). Since the 10' base used to anchor it to the trailer hitch was MIA, I decided to grab some 8' long 2x3x3/16" angle iron, and clamp the contraption to the trailer. I got about 10 degrees into the bend, and the clamps kept loosening up. Tighten them, and go again. Loose. Damn. The clamps are breaking. One of the clamps had a crack running through the webbing, and the other was just very bent. That's not working, but the fix, as always, is to weld something. I wasn't about to ruin the powdercoat on the trailer by welding directly, but I did make a bracket to bolt the bender to the angle iron, and TIG'd this outside, on the trailer (thank goodness it finally stopped raining!). This time everything went smoothly, I put the 40 degree bend in there, and packed everything back inside the garage (3 hours for one bend!). Afterwards, I notched the tube in the drill press with a hole saw to mate with the roll cage's cross bar, and then cut a 30 degree mitre on the bottom of the vertical bar to match the floorpan. This was definitely trial and error, as I didn't want to take a chance of cutting too much off, and needing to start over with another length of tube.
Posted by Z28tt at May 3, 2006 7:13 PM