Monday July 23, 2007.
The frame build has now moved onto the floor, the picture below shows the results of time grabbed over the weekend to start tacking the floor tubes together. The outer tubes weren’t bent precisely as I’d requested from the tube benders but a bit of effort in the vise saw that corrected. The whole assembly you see here is tacked down to the build plate in half a dozen places to keep things flat and in place.
The build plate BTW is not as flat as I’d hoped that it would be, from it’s previous life there is obviously a bow in the surface, the outer beams are straight though. The non-flatness is not a huge deal, it just needs to be taken into account when setting things up. To make sure that this stage is properly flat I’ll be setting up a laser level that projects a flat plane and measure the assembly at a good number of points.
If you’re reading this before you start your construction I wouldn’t recommend the type of build table I have here, if I did it again I would go for an open frame of 50mm X 100mm RHS tubes.
On another subject. The C5 Corvette suspension uprights I’m using don’t allow for camber adjustment at the outer end of the top wishbone, this is as they have a captive ball joint in them as part of the upright. The typical way to solve this issue would be to use 2 male rod ends at the inboard end of the wishbone, however that has disadvantages in terms of component life and road noise transmission. So after mulling over various solutions I found (was told) about these (see picture below). These come from here they are 3/4″ UNF on the threaded end with a 14mm hole through the crush tube. Obviously this is oversize for whats really required the items way 280g each which is roughly twice the weight of a 1/2″ male rod end, but on the other hand tube inserts will not be required (they’ll be threaded directly into the tube). And there’s no possibility of the things ever breaking. I have read some peoples opinion that they like the fact rod ends would break in the event of a severe crash thus adsorbing energy and shedding parts like an F1 car personally I think this is complete cobblers.
