Anyway, on to the actual update!
Finally scraped a set of dampers together. I think the grand total for these four has been about $400 shipped. Double adjustable Öhlins reservoir deals.
Alex made a nice write-up about the chassis progress, so I'll hand over to him:
Quote:
Assembled the starter and mounted it to the bellhousing with the correct lash:
Lately both Karl and I have become disenchanted with the idea of keeping the stock "frame rails" on the car and patching up the half cut-out floor. Mostly because it will be more or less impossible to quantify the chassis stiffness until the frame is completely done and can be tested. Also, the more I looked at the cruddy floor pan and firewall sections, the more I saw nothing but a piss-poor compromise that wasn't going to work well or look good.
I drafted up a proof of concept for a tube chassis, re-using most of the existing cage tubes until I was reasonably happy with load paths, triangulation, room for the driveline and driver/passenger.
The floor of the chassis is all straight mitered 2x2x0.065" and 2x3x0.083" ERW to make fixturing easy. The "drivers cell" is 1.75x0.095" DOM and the rest of the chassis is a mix of 1.5x0.065" DOM, 1x0.049" DOM, and .75x.75x0.065" square.
I'm going to break my own personal rule of not posting CAD screenshots. Here's one of the draft quality versions that started homing in on the final layout:
Making a stiff enough chassis that's also light is a bit of a brain buster, especially when you have to work around silly nuisances like an engine, transmission, and people.
I ran a really simple first cut beam analysis in Solidworks so I could iterate fast and get a rough idea of the stiffness:
These results gave us enough confidence to start building the chassis. At the same time, I'm now working on a much more comprehensive analysis model in different software that doesn't suck.
Chopping up some tube and laying it out:
Both halves tack welded and roughly positioned:
Dropped the body and driveline on the table just to see how it would look:
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So that's where we're currently at. Sorry for the slow progress. **** happens I guess.
