Still plugging away (Page 1 of 5)

Guess I owe y'all a little something so how about a peek at the front suspension?  Still waiting on a few parts to finish it up.

Not just a brace, its the whole damned strut tower, and yes, its bulletproof, no, I dont want to test it

Helps balance the weight of the engine out back.

busy day burned hand...just pretty pictures instead

One word:  WOW!

Video link of the glorious moment
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BES9TGSof6Q

Back to the grind, and cut, and weld. Things are moving quickly and I need to get this to the cage builder. But before I can do that I need to finalize steering so he can move it around. When the body went on we realized the angles were way out of whack for the column to the rack. I think I have a plan but I needed some fixed points to start taking measurements so I finally made the steering rack mount and soon I'll modify the steering column and mount points.

Awe inspiring.  I have never been so happy to lead a losing campaign in my long, loss filled life.

BABE Rally first week in June, then Capitol offense (4 days after we return from BABE) and it will be at GRM in October.

Of course that all assumes we finish on time.

Jeff and Jim W came by today with some presents for the Wartburg.

New wheels

17x7.5 fronts, 17x9 in the rear, should enable some nice wide meat on there.

Still got a nice set of 15 inch phone dials that we will use for the grassroots motorsports challenge since once we get the right tires for these they wont be very budget friendly, but they will help keep her planted on the Lemons track.

Finally finished up the tie rods.  These were an adventure.  The inner joints are heim joints 5/8 right hand thread.  No problem, the supplier was easily able to supply the correct threaded rod ends to weld to the tube for these.

On tie rods one end needs to be right hand thread and the other left hand thread to make them adjustable.  I should have though of this before hand and gotten the heims in left hand but I didn't.  Getting correct ball joints in left hand thread was easy, they are a standard VW bug part.  But they are 14mm x 1.5 left hand thread pitch.  Finding metric weldable tube ends in the U.S. is hard enough, finding them in left hand thread is near impossible.  Finally a supplier in the UK was able to provide them, and even with shipping they were cheaper than the standard rod ends I used for the inners....whew.

We'll see how it works in practice.  I ran across a similar setup online and at first I was very skeptical, but then I found a few racks built by Flaming River that use the same setup so the theory must be sound.

If we ran the stock length bump steer would have been terrible.  I thought about having the rack shortened but I lack the equipment to do that myself and Im trying not to hire out any professional help on this (aside from the cage)