Swarf

spherical_02Lots of it, in fact. I’ve been lathing away following Dan‘s suggestion on my post yesterday about how to resolve the issue about welding the super-thin sleeve into the bearing housing on the wishbone. His suggestion, which is pretty obvious in retrospect, like all the best ideas, is to leave a flange on the end of the sleeve that’s sturdy enough to be able to weld it to the housing. The only issue with this that I can think of is that machining the sleeve to exactly the right length is going to need lots of assembling and disassembling,  but that’s no great deal really.

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Balls, sphericals in fact…

suspension_bushes_doneI’ve finally managed to finish all the Delrin bearings which is a great relief. Mind you, as I went around the car I rather refined the process. So much so that the last few were much better than the earlier.

“Like pancakes”, Anthea said. Indeed, something to do with the frying pan, methinks.

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Acetal swarf…

suspension_bushes_02…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.

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Suspending a spectre

acetalI’ve still been thinking about suspension bearings. At one point I’d convinced myself that the thing to do was just to cut up the existing wishbones and weld some bushes in into which I could put some rod-ends. I still might do that, to be honest. In fact, I suspect Jeremy would be happy to provide a complete set of new ones.

However, in the meantime I was talking to one of the Baldwin chaps at Silverstone. Ian is one of the main designers of the BDN car that won the championship last year. What’s more, his new car is running well this year although hampered by a late start. I was talking to him about bushes and he said that the new car, as a bit of an experiment really, was using bushes made with Acetal. This is an engineering polymer that is commonly used for similar things. I did some calculations and it does look as though it’s up to the job. (And, to be honest, it’s clearly tougher than bungy rubber or nasty polyurethane anyway.)

So, I bought a stick of it to see how it goes.

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Preparations…

clean_garage_01It’d be nice to get going, but of course I need to wait for things to be manufactured. In the meantime I’ve been getting the Fury ready for its next outing, and starting to organise myself for the Spectre build.

Apart from starting to make a big list of things to buy, do and design, I started out with clearing out the garage. I’m going to have to try and build the car with the Fury tucked in the corner of the garage, unless I can find some other convenient way of storing the Fury. In the meantime, I know this will work as I originally built the Fury while the Dax was still in the garage, and I think that was wider than the Fury is, even though it was a se7en-like car.

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