Friday, April 1, 2011

Steering Contest

It took some engineering but we now have a fully operational and reasonably adjustable steering system. It is a cross steer system so it will most likely have a similar bump steer to the Dodge van that most of the parts came from but it won't be as bad as doing a near steer set-up. We messed with the toe angles for a while to get them in the ball park but caster has to be corrected via steel shims between the leaf packs and axle pads. This bit of fine tuning will take place on Chris' "space age technology" alignment rack back at Babe's Automotive. We checked out some factory steering box mounts from some of our other wrecks of the same era and decided that the mount that we designed was suitably over-built. The manual steering box came from a factory V8 '65 Valiant that I parted out a few years back. It's a standard ratio box and feels tight and responsive. We even managed to use the Valiant pitman arm in our design. One more necessary piece of the puzzle banged off. So lets see, it steers and stops. What's missing? Oh yah, go power!! That part will be ridiculously exciting and will be happening sooner than later. Or should I say sooner than body work. In case you haven't noticed I really don't care for body work, or dry wall for that matter. The results are rewarding but it's so boring.

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