…I seem to have been filling the garage with it as I’ve been making the suspension bushes that I talked about. It took me a while to work out the best way of making them but I’ve mostly done it now although it’s taken an alarming amount of time for a few grams of car. Along the way I’ve reduced about 1500mm of 28mm diameter Delrin rod to, largely, swarf that’s in the bin. The big issue, actually, has been getting the tolerances right so that the bush grips properly in the wishbone but rotates around the bearing shaft properly.
The photo here shows one of the suspension bearings completely assembled. Obviously, you can’t see much but I didn’t have my X-Ray camera with me at the time. So, you’ll just have to trust me, those white bits are the Delrin suspension bushes. Interestingly, I was perusing my HPC gears catalogue, thinking about reverse gearings, and realised that they sell a lot of gears made out of Delrin. Quite versatile stuff… The second photo, here, is of part of the front suspension. Again, you can see the white bushes peeking out of the bearings of the rocker arm.
You can also see the steering rack here, which I’ve mounted as I want to be sorting out the steering column soon. Note that unlike the Fury it’s inside the chassis, rather than sticking out the front. That might make it less likely to get biffed, you never know.
I’ve been thinking about dampers, as I think I might have mentioned. (I always get the feeling that I’m repeating myself. However, my commitment to stream of consciousness writing, otherwise known as can’t be arsed to edit it it go back and check it, means I can never be sure.) Dave Turner, one of the local cam7 massive, has recently been designing dampers and there’s a possibility that I’ll buy some off him for the Spectre. I’m pressing him at the moment for precise costs and a delivery commitment. If he comes through, I might well go with them. In the meantime, here’s a picture of the final CAD assembly. Yes, you’re right, the damper rod seems very studly. The reason for this is something to do with how the fluid flows inside, but I forget the details right now.
OBP did come through the the pedal box, and here it is. At first sight it looks as though it’ll be fine, and experimenting with it placed inside the chassis shows that I should be able to mount it as far forward as possible, and perhaps put a power bulge in the front of the pedal area that goes around the side of the front suspension in order to give me a little more room should it be necessary.
The one obvious problem is that access to these things, in their Morris Minor-esque position as Dan’s reminded me, is going to be quite tricky so I’m going to have to be careful about that when it comes to panels and so on.
The other obvious problem, I didn’t say I could count, is that in common with other OBP pedal boxes the plate through with the master cylinders mount is alarmingly flimsy. In the Fury this was resolved by bolting the OBP pedals to the front of the pedal area which was quite chunky. Here I’m going to have to weld another plate across the rear of the box to strengthen things up a bit. In fact, I’m going to have to weld something firmer into the floor of the pedal area to which to bolt this box, as just mounting it on the aluminium floor isn’t too sensible.