Another Milestone

I forget what I said I was going to do this past week, but here's a rundown of the events as they happened.

Just to recap, last week I started working on the brake pedal.  Well now it's finished.  Here's before and after shots.

Besides being shiny in a couple spots, the important change was that, in effect, I moved the arm in the middle by about 2" and that changed the leverage the pedal applies to compensate for having manual brakes.  I had to put a bend in both the brake pedal and the clutch pedal to improve the spacing between them.  I got so excited that I was able to bend this 1/4" steel that I forgot to take a picture (but I will go back and take some later).  I really wanted to see how they were going to look in the car and here they are!

I'm very happy with how they turned out.

In other news, I did install the gas tank.

And best of all, I brought the engine block to a machine shop to start the prep work.  This is a big milestone for this chunk of metal has been sitting in our garage for nearly a year, being worshiped like an iron tiki idol.

Arrival May 2010

I did some final prep work at home.  Here I am taking out the bearings for the camshaft.

Before I dropped it off, I wanted to be ready.  These guys are the big leagues and they know their stuff.  I wanted to be able to talk their language and impress them with my plans.  I had my parts all listed, and the calculations I had done on compression ratios, octane requirements, spark advance, valve overlap, expected torque and horsepower.  It took me days to do all this, but it would be worth it.  Yep, they're going to ask me hundreds of questions about the car and the engine, and of course, they'll want to see the pictures.  I'm ready for anything they throw at me.

You can probably imagine that the shop is located under an elevated section of the Garden State Parkway surrounded by vacant lots and used tire dealers.  I let them know I'm here and back in to the driveway.  Maybe this is a good time to explain the ordeal getting the block into the car in the first place.  It weights about 175 lbs. and even I couldn't ask Laurie to help me load it.  But I had an idea and it goes like this:

The block has been sitting on a stand as you can see in the photo above.  I originally expected to take the block off the stand, put it on the floor and then pick it up and put it in the car.  But since the block is already 2 feet off the floor, maybe I can just raise it another 6" to get it in the back of the car.  So I used my jack to raise the whole stand and set it on the supports I have for the car.

Now the stand won't be able to roll, but the car can.  One of two things will happen, either the car will knock over the engine and ruin it, or it will neatly slip into the car.  With some careful driving by Laurie and a couple wooden blocks to raise the car a little, in the engine went.

Well, almost all the way.  I disconnected it from the stand and pulled it in the rest of the way.

Now back to the machine shop.  I back into the driveway and open the hatch, I guy comes out and grabs the block with one hand and pulls it out of the car.  I'm thinking, "Don't scratch my car and be careful with my block!", but what comes out is "how's it goin'".  I tell them what I want done and they say "okay, we'll call you when it's done".  That's it.  No questions, no pictures, no comments.  And I see my block on on a pile with 30 others waiting their turn at the boring machine.  I felt like I was abandoning a helpless puppy.  I hope they're taking good care of my tiki idol.

Anatomy of a Brake Pedal

Who ever thinks about their brake pedal?  You push it and the car stops.

Actually, there's lots of math an physics that goes into that simple concept.  I have a brake pedal from a car that had power brakes (as almost all cars have had for the last 20 years).  Power brakes add extra force to the effort applied by your leg when you press the pedal.  I didn't want to bother with having power brakes so I have to create the equivalent force another way.

It starts with the leverage being applied by the brake pedal itself.  Here is the pedal I have.

It pivots around the tube on the end and the arm that sticks-out about 1/3 of the way down pushes the brake mechanism.  In this case, the leverage is 3x.  If I push the pedal 3", the arm moves 1" but 3x harder.  Push with 50 lbs of force and get 150 pounds.

But that's not going to stop me well enough in my setup.  Without power brakes, I estimate I'll need about 6x leverage to get proper stopping forces.  My plan is to shorten the distance from the tube to the arm and lengthen the distance from the arm to the pedal.  To do this, I'll have to cut and reweld in a few places.

Here are my first cut marks.  I plan to take 1 1/2" out of the upper part.

Cut that apart.

Open up the bottom to reinsert the cutoff piece.

And reweld everything back together.  (It's just taped at this point, but you get the idea)

I just need to make sure it will actually fit in the car this way before I weld it and then install it.  By the way, the ratio is now 6.2x.

And Some Progress Too...

Here is a quick list of some of the things I did recently.

Installed the steering shaft.

Installed the gas pedal and started the installation of the clutch pedal.

Started installation of the radiator.  Running into some issues with this.  More to follow.

I was going to install the fuel tank, but found that I have the wrong size bolts.  Easily resolved, but for now, the fuel tank still sits on the floor.

Figured out how I want to run the flexible brake lines from the frame to the brake calipers.  It had to be done in a way so as to not rub on anything.

Off-topic.  I saw a couple extra bonus pictures I thought I'd throw in.

Laurie having dinner with Joe Girardi (manager of the NY Yankees).  Maybe she's a secret Yankees fan?

Ben receiving a life-saving award from the Red Cross with a commendation signed by President Obama.

Bling!

I did manage to accomplish a few things this past week, but one of the highlights had to be the arrival of my wheels!  I ordered them back in October and they're finally here.

The style of these wheels match the original Shelby Cobra.

My one fear turned out to be okay and that was that the front brakes I had installed would be too big to fit inside the wheels.  Fortunately, they clear by 3/16"!

Brief Detour

A week ago, I laid out my plans for what I hoped to accomplish this week.  Then life got in the way.

Over the next 10 weeks, I'm going to be teaching a boat building class at our local arboretum.  Since the director knew I have a fully-equipped workshop, he asked if I could build a storage locker for the tools and supplies we'd be using in the class.

It became more involved than I originally planned, but I'm happy with the results.

It's a monster - four feet wide and three feet tall.

The class is held one afternoon each week for kids around 12 years old.  I expect that I'll be spending extra time between classes fixing problems and keeping the project on the time schedule.  It should be fun.  I'll post a few progress pictures along the way.

Disaster Strikes (then averted)

Before anyone gets worried, I didn't hurt myself (or anyone else), I didn't break anything and I didn't do any permanent damage to anything.  But here is what happened.

First of all, we went skiing during Presidents week and had a great time (that why there were no posts during the week of Feb 20), but that doesn't have anything to do with this post.

Of course, I ordered some parts before we left for vacation and they arrived while we were away.  We got home late Saturday night so on Sunday (Feb 27) I opened the boxes and had received the bolts I needed to complete my rear brake installation.  Everything went together easily.  Then, as I checked it over, I saw the problem.  Remember those lovely brake brackets I toiled over (and was very proud of)?  Well, they were flawed and the brakes didn't fit correctly.  It was like I was hit in the gut and I walked out of the garage with my head hanging.  How could it happen?  I measured, tested, fit, measured some more.  I couldn't do any more work that day.  Would I have to start over again making new brackets?  I couldn't believe it.  Let me show you what happened.

Remember this?  The bracket is the curved gray piece with 4 bolts going through it.  I thought it was perfect.

I installed the bracket.  Now it's painted blue (you can see 2 of the bolts going through it.

Here's the problem.  When you look down from the top, the brake caliper is rubbing on the upper control arm and will hit the bolt head as the brakes are applied.  (I tried to put a couple arrows to show where the problem is)

 The black bushing was much thicker than I thought it would be and it pushed the upper control arm back toward the caliper.

For about 2 days, I couldn't do anything.  I also felt like I couldn't show my virtual face until I had a resolution.

I finally forced myself to go back to work.  I started over again with the design to see what I would have done differently if I knew about the clearance issue.  I made 3 new versions of the bracket out of wood and tested each one on the assembly.  I selected the one I thought fit best and fine tuned it.  Then I checked it against the actual brackets and found that if I moved 2 of the mounting holes about 1/4" and did some grinding, I could reuse the old brackets.  So that's what I did.

In this picture, the bottom bracket has been modified.  Holes 2 and 4 were each moved to the left about 1/4" and the overall bracket was shortened.

Here they both are after the modifications.

Repainted and as good as new.

This afternoon, I reinstalled them and I'm very happy with the results.  This is a picture of the other side compared to the photo above, but you can see that now there is plenty of room between the bolt head, the control arm and the caliper.

Here is a photo of the new bracket installed and ready to go.

Here is the completed rear suspension.

What a relief...

I did actually get myself to do a few other things this past week.  I refurbished the fuel tank.  That will be installed this week.

And, I started test fitting the aluminum panels that will form the trunk area.

We had a lot of visitors this week (thanks to Ben's squash team party at our house).  One of the dad's offered to let me use the sheet metal fabrication facility at his company which will be great.  I have a lot of metal to cut and bend.

Here are some goals for this week.  Modify the brake and clutch pedals (more on that later) and install them.  Install the gas tank.  Install the steering shaft.  Make a mock-up of the engine to check clearance in the engine compartment.  And of course, order more parts.

I'm glad to say, I'm back in business.