October 27, 2009.

Some stuff ups and progress to report this time…

The lower A arms have hade the ball joints fitted, this was not cheap, but I know the job was done properly.  Apparently the Moog parts were sufficiently different in size that each part needed to be bored uniquely.

Now that was done it enabled the first trial fit of the suspension to the frame…

Below is the front left, which looks good to me.

With the damper out the suspension is able to drop some more so one of the worries I had on running out of travel in that direction has been overcome at least.

I would show you a picture of the other side except, I made two left hand side upper arms, Doh! At least I can count that as a spare and not scrap.

Next is the rear, which looks good except the damper interferes witht the top A arm so it can’t attach to the upright! Doh!

I had not modelled the springs in the CAD model and this has come back to bite me, sure enough now I’ve put them in there’s an interference in the model just like the real thing.  I should have known better, luckily the fix is quite easy, just to cut of the brace tubes and move them out 20mm should do fix the issue. (Note the upright is on the wrong side, the tie arm will be to the front when the right part is on there).

So moving on, I’ve also begun the steering rack support, below is the MkI version…

This one I got carried away with and fully welded off of the car, which meant it warpped like hell, then when it was offered up to the frame I realized I’d read the drawing wrong, so a few wasted hours there then.

When I’d done it I didn’t like the design anyway so back to the PC to redo the design to use angle rather than box for the vertical tubes.  Then I got lucky and found an even better piece of steel in the scrap bin of a local steel fabricators, so the MkII below was made…

Note its just tack welded, then it was tack welded into the frame…

And with the rack in place…

Or not as the case may be the CAD, predicted the rack would interfere with the two outer frame tubes, which it does and the next job is to recess and reinforce those, this I’m not worried about as the 50mm wide tube was a convienient size for construction but is excessive for the load on the tube, and I’ll be taking 15mm out of it at most.

Lastly I’ve made the required threaded inserts to support the the seat harness eye bolts.  Again these are way excessive strength and weight wise but its not that much weight in the grand scheme of things.

These started off as 40mm steel bar, the eye bolts are 7/16″ UNF this and some other parts have shatered the dream of having the car fully metric.