shooftie

i made a few prototypes, aluminum with quick spray bomb paint. What do you think, silly, sensible, or none of the above?

Update, in a way.

Still fooling with the idea. Made this version to see how a swing away guard would work. The proportions are a bit screwy but I like it enough to to try again.

It took longer than making a baby but I finally have my big battery installed. I got this Northstar 200 AHr battery some time ago, I think I mentioned it in this blog post. The size and shape of the battery made it seem like it would fit easily under the rear seat but it just doesn’t ( without taking up more space than it needs, if that makes sense). I toyed with the idea, and went as far as making brackets, of mounting it  up under the van between the door sill and frame rail but no, that didn’t look right. So I settled upon the admittedly dubious spot of where the spare tire sits. A couple of problems with this placement. Number one is that I now have to find a spot for the spare tire. Ah but what about my much talked about swing away spare tire carrier? More on that at the end of the post. The other dubious characteristic of this battery location is that it places 128 lbs forward of the front wheels. I’m a little worried that it might make a difference in how the van negotiates dips and ditches in logging roads. Skipping a head a bit, I have had the battery installed for a week and I really don’t notice any driving different on paved roads. I made a carrier for the battery quite a while back, crikey, it was a year ago, since then I welded in some locating brackets that the battery fits into, and some tabs on the side tubes for supporting brackets. The brackets are made from 1X1/8″ stainless and I bent them to fit to the van frame rails. They are secured to the frame rails by 5/16″ stainless bolts that I will someday change to 8 mm. The bracket to the tab connection is done with 1/4-20 bolts and instead of nuts I used stainless ring nuts. The rings are to secure nylon straps that cross the battery and hold it very securely to the tray. Ok, some pics of it installed. First pic taken from driver’s side, one stainless bracket not fastened. Gives you the general idea of how the battery lies.  

And on the passenger side. You can probably make out the red nylon hold down straps going up over the battery.

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I had thought of making aluminum side splash plates but I was dissuaded by the changing angles and company curves needed so I used some scavenged treadmill material. I installed 1/4-20 riv nuts in the existing holes in the van frame and bolted the treadmill material. 

It’s not great but it’s not bad. It’s just there to reduce water splashing on the battery. Not shown in the pic are tubes leading from the battery vent up over the battery and on up to behind the front grill. When I did that I was thinking I was clever, I thought that leading the vents up high would prevent water getting into the battery if I happened to go through a deep puddle. But I found out later that the battery vents have a valve in them to prevent water ingress. A note on the wiring. I ran a short length of 4 gauge wire from the negative terminal back to the bolt holding on the transverse member supporting the front differential. On the positive terminal a short length of 4 gauge comes off the terminal and up into a black box (attached by Velcro) on top of the battery. In that box is a Blue Seas Maxi Fuse block, with a 70 A fuse.

Update: in the comments Marius wondered about battery cold weather performance. Here is a graph I found in one of Northstar’s  documents .

     Then out of the box and through some plastic sheathing and a sealed bulkhead fitting into the battery compartment behind/under the driver’s seat. Then it continues on to connect with my Blue Seas ACR. I’ll write more on that when I tidy up the wiring, I’m going to change the auxiliary power distribution layout there. I was surprised and pleased to discover that when all is bolted up tight the stainless straps from the tray to the frame seem to support the entire weight of the battery. The bolts at the rear, where the tray hinges on, have no weight on them. So that pretty well sums up the installs the battery. As mentioned I will post more on the auxiliary power distribution set up when I finally fix the positions of the various components. So… The spare tire, where does it go? It’s time for a confession, I couldn’t get my swing away tire carrier to work the way I wanted to. I’m not going to explain all the things I tried, and I did try a lot of things. But I could not get happy with the rigidity of the set up. The tire vibrated in the carrier when I smacked it with my hand. It bugged me no end. I finally lost my patience and removed it, cut out the hinge from the bumper and welded the bumper back together and painted it. I’m going to make a hatch mounted tire carrier, don’t laugh… Yet. In the meantime I’ve pulled my old Paulchen rack out and I have the tire bolted on that.  

And the bumper…  well its ok, but I’m not ecstatic about how far the end caps stick out, oh well maybe I can say it provides better side protection and its Mk I. And i still have to paint the tow loops and the receiver hitch.

Had a really frustrating week, seemed as though everything I touched went sideways. Most annoying was trying to eliminate vibrations in my swing away tire carrier. The latch pulls the swing away tight to the bumper assembly and I am pleased with how that finally worked out, but I don’t like the small amplitude vibration I get on the holder when the tire is attached. I think I am going to weld on a stiffening gusset to the upright and see if that will stiffen things up.

I bought a cheap rod bender from Princess Auto, this one here. It was on sale for 79 bucks. It works ok for what it is, and I thought instead of just bending random shapes while I try it out I would actually make something “useful”.

Well, I tried making a tail light protector and I soon realized that you REALLY NEED TO MAKE A JIG!

I’m showing you the result as a warning, think things out before you start merrily bending stock 🙂

The the tricky part was locating the little stand-offs accurately on the screw holes in the tail light. It’s obvious that the tail light is thicker at the top, but it also has subtle curves laterally and I was trying to match those curves and that made placing the little hollow studs for the mounting screws maddeningly difficult. You can see the nasty welds at those studs, result of tacking, checking, cutting, tacking, checking, cutting…

You really do need a jig.

And I think the guard would look a whole lot better if the vertical cross wires were not welded on top of the horizontal wire but welded to the middle of the section. I’m not going to try another until I make a jig, but even assuming I pop one off without pulling out my hair, these would be fussy and expensive Vanagon jewellery.

Not quite an unqualified success, but not a complete failure, I’ll settle for that. One of my sway bar drop links broke again and instead of the kind of repair I did previously , I decided to make new ones from stainless and beefier stock. I’ll detail that build when I have them welded up and bent. But I needed new cup washers and rather than buy them ( aren’t they around 13 bucks each?) I thought I’d have a go at making some from 2″ stainless washers. Here are my results.

First I tried pressing a ball bearing into the washer with a socket as a back up. You see on this test washer that it doesn’t make a good profile.

And on the 2″ washer.

So then I tried a different approach. Pretty self explanatory.

Useda friend’s press,applied between 10 and 15 tons of pressure. I also tried both ends of the male die, but the result wasn’t that great.

So I tried again. A quickly made female die with a rough profile of the shape I wanted, and a not very close match on the male.

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Back to the press and…

Well not great either, but I’m going to stop. I’d didnt do any research on how one should make dies for this purpose, i bet I am missing something quite obvious

The end of my unfinished drop link.

And with polyurethane bushings and the new washers. Hey, note that I have ground a rough radius on the inboard side of the bushings. This helps them fit into the recess on the lower control arm. No’ they aren’t quite that same as the stock washers. The stock washers have a larger un curved area and turn up more quickly at the edges. But I figure when the bushings are compressed when installed, the washers will make enough contact and still allow some lateral movement of the drop link.

As I’m now using geological time scale in describing the progress on my rear bumper build, this latest update comes very quickly after the back up light install.

I needed to make a latch that would secure the swing away carrier tightly, but yet be reasonable easy and quick to use. I tried four designs, my designs, conclusively crappy designs. This, my fifth attempt would be my last, next stop would be buying a de staco type draw latch.

I still had the Delrin cone and socket arrangement that was for my first design. The cone and socket does work well to locate the arm to the steel back stop that is welded to the bumper subframe. So I kept that and made a draw latch.

Reinventing the wheel.

But I learned a bit while doing it. It’s interesting how the effective lever arm changes on an offset hole draw mechanism like this. The pivot points, effective distance, changes from about 3/4″ when draw hole ninety degrees from the pivot to zero when draw pivot are inline. This gives great mechanical advantage when closing the latch, and the over centre part helps keep the latch closed.

I occurs to me that describing all this is a bit of a mug’s game. Maybe some of you think that I should have bought a latch and be done with it, a very valid point. Some of you are probably not very interested in some damn latch – just show the finished project, an equally valid point. And some might think I’m boasting about making the darned thing. It’s that last suggestion that bothers me.

You could make the case that writing any kind of blog is a tad egotistical. But believe me, the best thing about writing this kind of blog is finding out that you might have helped or at least nudged someone in the right direction.

Ok, enough blether.

I made the handle from 1″ thick aluminum. Part of some offcuts from the water jet guy. Had a nice curve and I continued the curve ti make the working end. Drilled holes for the pivots, slotted the end for the fixed pIvot ( that attached to a little bracket that was made from some 1/8″ thick stainless, mounted to the carrier with 1/4-20 bolts, helicoil inserts in the carrier).

I turned  and milled a bit of stainless to hold the bail ( the moving pivot) and the bail is a bit of 5/16″ stainless rod that I bent into a U shape and threaded the ends.

I used some 1/8″ stainless plate and 1/4″ rod to make the little catch on the backstop that hooks onto the bail.

I was worried that there wouldn’t be enough give in the mechanism, so I stuck in some hard rubber washers under the nuts on the bail. You can see them in the first two pics. I found that there was enough flex in the backstop latch that the washers weren’t needed.

Ok, the handle and fixed pivot.

And mounted on the bumper.   

See how I have to use some spacers to match the thIckness of the cone and socket bases to give the upright of the carrier a bigger surface to pull against? I’ll try and make a nicer version of the spacers, maybe one piece.

I have to make a plug for that hole. Also a fair bit of grinding and sanding to be done before painting. But hey, I’m making some headway.

Oh, and I have yet to weld on some sort of tab thing on the end of the handle so I can pin it to that curved tube as a safety or even a lock.