You may remember from my last post…
… that my plan is to narrow two front axles to build a smaller buggy than the last one – http://www.jimnybuggy.com
So here we go…
Marking out as best I could… I planned to wrap a sheet of A4 paper around to get parallel edges, but it crumpled over the welded joint, so did it by eye with gorilla tape…
… and a big engineering square…
Blimey! That worked quite well 🙂
Back in position and yet another re-measure before cutting… Gorilla tape used again…
Bugger! Never thought of that?! LOL
Only one thing for it then… hand job with the hacksaw… 😦
Done, but Oooh! That does look a bit narrow!
Just need to weld it all up then?
It looks better with the shafts inserted… you get a better idea of the track of the vehicle. It should work out (from my calculations) that the track width (outside of each tyre) will be 50″, and the wheelbase will be 67″).
Edges bevelled for welding.
I’ve ordered a length of M12 studding to insert through the axle and bolt it up with big washers on the end to keep everything in place and aligned for welding up. Something Richard “Rockwatt” Wattam suggested, and what I’ve seem done similar on “Texax Metal” on the Discovery Channel.
All un-necessary brackets removed (and the offside ARB mounting bracket cut off carefully as my mate Alan needs one).
I also need to get some nice thick walled box section to make some strengthening gussets for each side like added above.
A friend (the Rhino Ray!) asked on Facebook how I proposed to make the rear wheel steering work… My answer? Simply! The rear axle setup will be the same as the front, only rotated 180 degrees, so a standard steering box will be used (with the power steering pump driving both boxes, as the rear probably won’t see much use really), with a long steering shaft back to a lever in a “gate” as above, so you basically get steer left, centre, steer right on the back wheels. The shaft’s rotation may need gearing up obviously, so I’ve got an old standard Jimny transfer box to pull to pieces for a look inside, and to rob a couple of gears to effect this gearing up, so that the lever will get a decent lock on the back (without putting too much strain on the rear CVs).
More soon! 😉
Additional photo added 27/10/21
After a little bit of confusion on facebook as to where I’d cut and why…
This bit has been removed from the front axle casing’s longer side of the tube… it had to be 13″ long that was removed as that’s the difference between a long and a short half shaft… I had to start at the limit of the widening of the axle ‘pumpkin’ so that the tubes being welded up would be “the same” (ish) diameters… that pushed the other end of the cut right into the middle of the (nearside) radius arm bracket, which while being a bit of an inconvenient cut, will give plenty of meat around the welding up area as can be seen in the photo above… The added benefit of this was that while cutting the (left) side of the radius arm bracket to remove that section of tube, this left the ‘U’ in the bracket slightly bigger (a series of angle grinder cuts were made) that then suits the increased diameter of the tube being inserted as it a little way up the widening to the diff pumpkin…
Here in a photo repeated from above…
Hope that’s clearer? 😉
Lil'Bugga 