It’d be nice to be able to move the car around in a while, so having put the rear suspension together I set about the front suspension.
Tag: suspension
Txing
Yet another odd weekend; one step forward, two steps back, two steps forward. Whatever, I haven’t accomplished what I set out to do. Ho hum.
Everything was all going so well too. I assembled the left rear suspension, using all those bearings I made a while ago, and assembled the upright using the nice shiny new driveshaft. Continue reading “Txing”
Well, that’s annoying…
I ordered a set of taps from RDG Tools and tapped one of the brake mounting blocks to M10x1.5 for the mounting bolts through the calipers. The end result is shown in the photo here. I’ll make some spacers of the proper size, and get the correct length bolts, rather than using stacks of washers. However, it seems to fit fine which is good.
Rolling and tumbling
I’ve finally managed to get the roll cage tubing, as seen in the picture. Astonshingly, it’s taken me about three months to get this. I went to the suppliers that Jeremy recommended, Tube Engineers of Market Rasen in Lincolnshire, as that seemed sensible. Since then I’ve had a long stream of excuses and woffle including “he’s in France”, “we’re setting the machines up for 38mm next week”, “oh, I’d forgotten about you”, “I’ve lost your email” and “we’re notching the tubing”. The last is special because I didn’t ask them to do this. In fact, a selection of the tubes arrived notched in a useless manner (how could they know what angle I needed them notched at?), what’s more, the front hoop (the only difficult bit because that’s the only bent tube) arrived a different length from what my drawing and my email specified.
However, I’ve been waiting so long I decided to just work around the problem which I think I can. I certainly shan’t be putting any business their way in the future though.
Weekending
I’ve managed to spend a bit of time on the car this weekend. First of all, I wanted to be really sure that the diff was going to fit properly. So, I cut out some supports for it, following the CAD model that I showed you a short while ago. However, in an advance on the normal materials technology I used hardboard rather than aluminium for the diff support plates. It’s much easier to cut out, so it’s bound to be a better choice.
Two car Tim
There’s quite a lot of good photos around of the race at Snetterton. The one shown here was taken by Derek Jones’ Dad at Russell chicane. That’s Tony just behind me, thankfully.
Creeping forwards
There’s another race meeting coming up so I needed to sort the Fury again. After Silverstone I was concerned that I might have deranged the suspension after narrowly missing a spinning Duncan by escaping over the huge kerb at Becketts. I noticed at the weekend that the F1 people were whinging about Monza having put some huge kerbs in. Serves them right, I reckon.
So, I tipped the Spectre chassis on its side-it’s still light enough to do that-and put the Fury in an accessible position and spent a merry 5 hours checking the suspension alignment, which all seemed to be fine. Hmm, that was a waste of time then.
De-fumigated
After getting grey gunge all over my arms, I seem to have decided that I’m not happy with the POR-15 as a chassis treatment. It didn’t seem to be working as well as when I did the same thing to the Fury after setting that on fire. The difference is that back then I’d just had the chassis shot-blasted and that provides a pretty good key for paint-like stuff. So, I think I’m going to get the chassis powder coated and I phoned a local company, GKL Coatings, that Dan has used for powder coating and they sounded pretty competent so I’ll take the chassis there in a while. However, that means I really need to get everything that I want to do to the chassis done as soon as possible.
Fumigated…
Having now got the front uprights from Jeremy the first job was to take them to bits! So, I took the bearing caps off and hence the hubs and exposed this rather nice looking spidery thing. These uprights are interesting in that they’re essentially a set of parts. The bearing support shaft here is just held at the back of the upright by a big nut. The steering arm, as you can probably see, is also a separate part.
Stand upright at the front!
I’ve finally got the front uprights through from Jeremy, who hadn’t received them from his suppliers for ages. Here’s a photo of one of them, as you can see it’s jolly shiny!
Oddly, I seem to have two discs too, which I didn’t realise that Jeremy was going to supply. They’re not the size that I’m going to use, and have already bought, but I might be able to press them into use as spares, I suppose.