by
schwim » August 17th, 2018, 9:39 pm
Zippy was transplanted from his home of 4-5 years when the deck on the side of the house got torn down and rebuilt. He found himself back on the driveway, albeit not necessarily in a form that he would have liked. He was currently rocking only two wheels:
My father-in-law was coming for almost a week and the project while he was here was to get Zippy as close to ready to get his two halves mated as possible. Spoiler alert - It ended up not being that close.
First, I ordered all of the rubber bits I'd need to mate the pan to the body. These parts shipped via two day but ended up arriving 3 days after Garry went back home.
Garry refuses to do anything that requires decision-making and likes to do the mindless grunt work so he got tasked with removing the bottoms of the heater channels.
While he was doing that, I decided it was time I tackled the front end. I had been talking myself out of doing it because I was worried that I would mess something up that couldn't be rectified like cutting the leaves too short or something similar.
The front end is a 7 inch narrowed beam with adjusters that I bought on the TS classifieds. It came with an absolutely unusable and super sketchy half-assed set of leaves that could not be reused so I needed to shorten the leaves from my original beam.
I ziptied the end of the leaves so I could feed it through the center adjuster. As you push the leaves through, the zip tie just keeps getting pushed out of the way. It just gets left in there when done.
The beam doesn't utilize end bearings so I needed to use the buggy-type sleeves. Luckily, I had ordered them .... almost exactly 4 years to the day
Which got me to the point at which I had the torsion arms in place. I didn't, however, yet have the new locator indentation drilled in the torsion leaves. This was the part of the job that I had been so scared of. My drill press is designed for wood so it's not designed for the tight tolerances required. My solution was to drill through one of the extra locator screws that I had. I threaded it into a piece of wood to keep it level, welded the capture nut to it so I could keep it from spinning then spent 10 minutes and two drill bits going all the way through it:
With that done, I screwed it into each arm, using it to keep the drill bit from wandering and from destroying the arm's threads. It worked great.
With that done, I removed the stock spindles, taking them and my dropped spindles to a local machine shop to get the king pin pressed out so they could be swapped. 2 days and $80 later, I got them back.
With that done, I started prepping the heater channel bottoms to get them ready to be welded on. The captured nuts at the front were long gone so I welded on some 10mm nuts to use:
With the two bottoms welded on, Garry's time at the house drew to a close and I was left to my own devices. I've tried to continue working on it and I've been knocking out little spots as time permits. I'll update the thread as soon as I've got something of substance to share.
'Till next time!
