Interference, shaft-wise

cageI’ve got the cage completed now, after a welding frenzy last week. Here’s a photo of the completed thing. It isn’t pretty, but from past experience it will look less awful with the bodywork on, as the bodywork goes rather higher than the raw chassis. I must admit that I’ve had a couple of ideas how to make it look a bit better, but they involve a degree of measuring and drawing that just isn’t feasible at the moment. As it is, though, it’s a all a bit of a maze of tubes.

standard_shaftThe thing I wanted to look at next was the driveshafts. A while ago I bought some standard Ford Fiesta driveshafts which look like the photo here. At least they do after you disconnect the joints on either end of the shaft. That’s a process that is described as “prise open the snap-ring in the joint and release the shaft” in the manual. That took me most of Saturday and I was coming round to the idea that beating myself to death with the shaft would be more fun before I worked out how to do it. That curious bulge in the middle of the shaft appears to be some sort of damper as it’s a socking great lump of steel clamped around the shaft by a sort of rubber arrangement.

shaft_componentsMy plan is to cut this shaft in half, because it won’t be the right length for me, and lengthen it to the correct size with a lump of thick-wall tubing connecting the two halves together. I can then use these two shafts (they’re going to be a different length on each side of the car) to get some real shafts made by the same chap I used to get the Fury shafts made.

shaft_in_situ_1So, I set about the rubber/steel damper thing with a collection of implements of destruction and separated it from the shaft and then cut the shaft in two. I then cut a bit if tubing to the correct-ish length and turned a couple of spacers so that the shaft would fit snugly in the tubing. That gave me the three components shown in the next photo. (And no, I don’t know why the tubing is such a fetching red colour. I don’t think it’s just rust, it seems to be meant to be that colour. As you can, possibly, see in that photo the spacers have been welded to the ends of the (half) shafts.

shaft_in_situ_2I then installed all this in the chassis, the diff is still there held up with the hardboard plates which is what the next photo shows. The problem with this, as is shown slightly better in the photo on the right, is that the shaft is astoundingly close to the chassis. In particular, it’s close to that diagonal tube that braces the corner of the chassis and also connects to the rear upper wishbone mount. In both of these photos the suspension is in the correct position for the static ride-height of the rear of the car and there’s about 25mm of bump available before the driveshaft bashes into the chassis.

Now, this is obviously exacerbated by that socking great tube in the middle of the shaft, and I could possibly get some slightly less socking tubing. However, it still seems a bit tight and I might have to lower the diff slightly to get enough clearance. In fact, it’d probably make sense to ask Jeremy what angle he reckons the driveshafts normally sit at.

Still, I suppose at least it’s some progress, even if mostly of the backwards variety.

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