Rubs hands together greedily...

Lou

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Home of Slant6-powered fun machines

I now have:
LCA inner bushings & pins
QA1 UCA's
LCA Boxing plates
F/R Bilstein dampers
Various Mancini tools to hopefully make it quick and easy to R&R the LCA bushings.
Plan is to tear into the LCA inners this weekend.

Not too sure I like the QA1 UCA's urethane bushings, I think that I'd prefer rubber. If these urethane bushings squeak I'll be gunning to replace them with rubber.

Modular front sway-bar is slowly coming together. I have made the pillow-block bearings for the initial torsion tube size, 1.375" X .06". If I did the math right that has about the same torsional spring rate as the common aftermarket front bars that aren't offered for these narrow track cars. Next up are the end flanges for the torsion tube. Then I'll weld on the pillow block mounts, after which I can start building the arms.

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Thom

Cross-threaded is tighter than Lock-tite

Found the smoking gun! RS LCA inner's pin fell out of the 'C' shaped rubber bushing. Then the inner sleeve fell off the pin when I picked them up. No wonder I had a slight shimmy at fwy speeds!

LS is back together with the boxing plate welded on and a rubber bushing. Waiting on setting the car on the front suspension to tighten the pin nuts and cotter them.

FWIW, NOT impressed with Mancini Racing's various front suspension tools. Excepting the t-bar removal tool none of those that I've tried to use actually worked. Lacking any instructions or diagrams I'm left to try to figure out the designer's intent on my own. What they call an upper ball joint remover doesn't align as their description says it will and what they call a lower ball joint remover may work to remove the upper tapered pin, but no way will it fit in there around the lower.

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Thom



Cross-threaded is tighter than Lock-tite

Got it all back together, but have some fine tuning of the front ride height to do yet. Nice to have the shimmy gone. Initial impression of the Bils is an overall nice ride. Once the ride height is dialed back in I'll make a date with MISF to swap on the QA1 UCA's and align it. Then I'll push on it on a favorite curvy road and see how it behaves. Stay tuned....

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Thom



Cross-threaded is tighter than Lock-tite

While the car was up on stands I measured the pinion angle. With the double-cardan joint at the slip yoke the drive-shaft should be between perfectly inline with the pinion gear's shaft to maybe 2° down (if the rear springs are particularly supple). It measures 2° UP! No wonder I've a drive-line vibration!
Was thinking to make new lowering blocks with more angle machined into them. Just ordered new spring perches. I'll cut off the old ones and set the pinion angle before welding on the new perches.

Finally got to drive a nice curvy road with the Bilsteins on. Too bad the idiot ahead didn't understand the signs that say "SLOWER TRAFFIC USE TURN-OUTS" and the 4 of us stuck behind him weren't enough evidence to convince him that he was slower than most. So even though it is miles out of the way to home that way I may just have to take it this evening.....
I am finally starting to see a need for a front sway-bar. I've been expecting this might happen and have something in the works.

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Thom



Cross-threaded is tighter than Lock-tite

Yeah, folks are always too slow on twisty roads. I do not recall ever having someone pull away from me on a mtn road. I like the looks of that bar. The endlinks look to be exactly what I have on the tubular bar on my 64 Dart.

Lou

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Home of Slant6-powered fun machines

Drove that road again today. The clean runs that I got between slow pokes were sublime. With a swaybar this thing should be much more fun than my old '67 Ranchero was on that road, and it was a lot of fun!

Design of the bar is such that if I've missed the size calc badly that I can change the tube size of the torsion section and make a new set of pillow block bearings to increase or decrease the torsional rate. Now if I can just get it built.....

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Thom



Cross-threaded is tighter than Lock-tite

You can also tune the bar by varying the length of the middle section and length of the arms.

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Ed
64 Valiant 225 / 904 / 42:1 manual steering / 9" drum brakes

Thom,

You might think if you would be willing to produce a few of those bars for some of us handling (and weight) freaks.

Thanks for considering,

Lou

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Home of Slant6-powered fun machines

Maybe I'm mistaken, but there are no aftermarket front sway-bars made for these early (narrow) cars?

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Thom



Cross-threaded is tighter than Lock-tite

I made a PST bat work on my 65.....

Its not that there are no bars.....its about the mounts.

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Yeah....Im the one who destroyed this rare, vintage automobile.....

There used to be an Addco 1.125" (solid). I just laid hands on the old one that was on my 64 Dart. Mounts were crap so I made my own. Firmfeel has a 62-66 sway bar for sale, I am pretty sure, and I thought a few other places. I would sell my Addco cheap, but shipping might kill us...

Lou

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Home of Slant6-powered fun machines

It was a qwik look, but I thought that I hadn't seen any bars listed on a couple different sites for the early cars. Been wrong before, likely will happen more often.

I haven't worked out exactly how I'm going to mount them, but I've made some split bushing blocks from 6061 T6 square bar for the chassis mounts. I'll have to take a pic I'll guess. Basically two 2.25" long blocks of 1" square aluminum stacked on top of each one another. Bored a hole thru the parting line centered on the length for the tubular portion of the bar. Intend to run the bar directly on the aluminum. Haven't decided whether or not they'll get a grease zerk. The bolts that hold them together around the bar will also attach them to structure welded onto the K member.

For making them, both for me and for others should that happen, I need to work out a simple means to make the end flanges for the tube. I need to do some design work first so that the bolt pattern for the arms will clear up to a 1.500" OD tube.

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Thom



Cross-threaded is tighter than Lock-tite

Sounds good, Thom. Have you thought of using Stock Car splined hollow bars for the torsion tube?

Lou

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Home of Slant6-powered fun machines

I did consider them. Problem is the length of the tube section is so short. The tube blank that I have is 24" long and I *think* that I may be shortening it a little. I don't recall finding anything that they made in the right size being near short enough.

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Thom



Cross-threaded is tighter than Lock-tite