Projects The bucket of ugly! A de-uglifying thread...

Chip, are those better than the rubber biscuits that Total Performance used? I had the rubber deal and they worked well, but I'm thinking your aluminum pieces would have been better. I know longer run the setup. I just want the info for my archives.

And I can't believe you were running without front shocks. Good gawd man!

 

You've got me seriously considering changing my too stuff tube shocks to frictions!

Posted using the Full Custom H.A.M.B. App!

 

Nice job, Chip. Looks good.

Marcus...

 

About time!


jerry

 

It's amazing to me how much incremental changes change the entire character of a car. It really wasn't horrible without front shocks, I wouldn't have called it dangerous or scary, (in a car-guy sort of way) but I knew that it needed something to dampen things. The difference of just hooking them up and playing with spring tensions a bit has been night and day! Several of the little annoyances that we put up with driving these cars (And this one IS very stable and fairly mannerly to begin with) are gone via just simply dropping some links. Even the right tire imbalance that I have been fighting with since the beginning, although not completely gone is greatly reduced. I have a an appointment with a place here in town for a "Road Force Balance" on Monday that will hopefully cure the rest of that issue. And, truth be told, with the angle these links are mounted at they aren't as efficient as they could be. After doing this I figured out that if I drilled the holes down lower and lessened the angle the links work at, the shocks would have quite a bit more travel range. That might be coming next week depending on how busy the world gets, we'll see...

I got a call last night from my good buddy JOHN EVANS who is a frequent poster on this thread. He is the little "machine shop angel" that sits on my right shoulder, that when I'm thinking about making something reminds me constantly about things like - using the right machine, holding the tolerance to, say nothing, geometric perfection, stuff like that. The little red guy on the left shoulder looks amazingly like a 25 year old me, before the days when I had access to mills and lathes and CNC plasma tables and such. He is more like "To hell with perfection, lets get stuff done!!" and pushes me to use the tools I have as efficiently as possible. John Gave me grief about showing my "meatball surgery" approach to making my spacer bushings last night by requesting I answer my phone as "Stone Axe Engineering"! And, he reminded me that all I had to do was jump in the car and roll across town and he would have knocked those out in a few minutes and they would have been perfect. Yup, they would have been! But these didn't have to be. As a matter of fact, the era I'm trying to invoke didn't have many cars that anyone would call "perfect". Even the best in the early sixties had little bits and pieces that were somewhat "rough". It's to me part of the charm of the era.

The other reason I showed as much of that simple process as the picture loader would let me, is to give others that don't have a John Evans 6 miles away an idea of how problems can be solved without the need of a complete machine shop at your disposal. I can't believe how many guys I talk to here and on other boards that live in small places where there just isn't a machine shop anymore, or they don't know the guy with a lathe down the street, and are waiting to find someone to make that spacer, or bushing, or what ever it is they need to get to the next step in their build. Sometimes that wait can take lots of time away from working on the project at hand and allow it to go stale. Some times creative use of what's available to you simply is the best way to get back on track and moving at a steady clip.... If I can help with that, well I think that's pretty damn cool!

 

Chip, I love your ingenuity. I have had my fare share of ah-ha moments during the process of building my 34 pickup. Its amazing what can be acomplished with little more than a welder, grinder, drill and hammer!

Sent from my VS840 4G using H.A.M.B. mobile app

 

To take your rant just one step further if I may, Chip, I for one am a little burned out on hot rod perfection.

The very best part of the "little books" and the earliest of the "big books" was what hot rodders and custom builders could do with a bare minimum of tools and facilities. The stuff they put together was 180 degrees from that which we've become accustomed today - the "Riddler" contenders and Street Rodder cover cars, for example - but they had the greasy fingerprints of the owner on 'em, not the elegant touch of the "experts".

And the early rodders drove the snot out of the cars they built. They got dirty, oily, rusty and worn. They broke, and they got fixed - sometimes crudely - once again unlike the magazine cars we have come to do our best to emulate today.

Sure, there's a middle ground - cars built partly by the owner and partly by experts - but even here we tend to find more professional and commercial solutions than unique, owner-devised approaches to any given problem. Is this a good thing? Maybe...maybe not.

I don't have anything against nicely finished cars - or against show cars for that matter - but I have a pure and uncomplicated love of what I call "homebuilts" that I grew up with. They are, in my view at least, the heart and soul of our hobby.

I'm sure this post will ignite a minor shit storm of protestation from the regular pontificators, and that's fine, and they are welcome to pursue the hobby any way they please. But at shows and runs, I for one tend to look past the pro-built exersizes in maintainance and gravitate towards the owner-built ones that show less perfection but a whole lot more down-home ingenuity.

Okay, rant over. Back to your regular programming...

 

"I wouldn't have called it dangerous or scary, (in a car-guy sort of way)

 

Yeah chip my whole roadster was built without a lathe,mill or other big machines. Well maybe a little help from my brothers old Craftsman lathe to turn down the cut off tie rod ends to fit inside the steering link tubing. Then luckily my neighbor insisted that his airplane approved welding friend do the welding. Beautiful welds. I hated to have to cover them with braze before the chrome.

As for your shock links. They need to be strait. Vertical. If for nothing else the look. Just doesn't look right at an angle. To me anyway. The rest of the shock is so nice and that is right out in the open for everybody to see.

 

I like to make stuff, when I'm able, but even then, if I find something that's manufactured and does the job just as good or better, I'm buying it. Time, fit and expense are factors that go into what gets on my cars or anything else I own.

 

The arms Total Performance used, had a slight bend and enabled everything to line up straight. I'm sure Chip could tweak those a little.

 

Either Dave Frieburger or Matt King wrote an editorial at Car Craft about ten years ago that was one of the best things I have ever read. "Is it safe, or is it car guy safe?"! Could you hand the keys to ANYONE and they could drive it and be okay, or did you have to know stuff to survive in it? If I have some time soon I'll dig it up and paste it here, 'cause it was cool and you could see little bits of everything you ever built in every comment.

 

I consider those little foot notes an anti-theft devise. They might take her, but they'll never make it up the street.

 

Just kinda thinking out loud, but if the links are pushing on the arm at an angle, will it flex and ultimately fatigue? Also, knowing the infamous "speed humps" (or my favorite, the "speed tables") around town, will the 318 springs go into bind and break?

 

Just checking in, this thread has me jonesin for a T again! My take the 27 roadster and slap together a little Mod. Have all the parts sitting here!

 

Their is safe, their is hot rod safe and then their is T bucket safe. If we wanted to be as safe as we could be in an automobile we would all buy a new Volvo every year. Anything less than that is a compromise. So those of us willing to compromise as far as a T bucket all we can do is make sure all our welds are secure and our tires and brakes are adequate for the weight of our cars.
As for your front shock brackets Chip. You know we wouldn't criticize you if we didn't love you. And I mean that in the most manly bro. way. Anyway I saw this mostly kit T at the local show today that wasn't as bad as some and it had some pretty kool aftermarket friction shocks on front. So I took a picture.

 

If you think about it, the suspension itself pivots around the center point of the front spring. That means as say, the passenger side lifts to go over something, the lower connecting point is moving to the centerline of the car. That in turn straightens the link in comparison to the shock arm. Gravity doing it's job and keeping the front tires on the ground as much as possible means that upward movement is much "livelier" than down ward movement against the shock arms. That is why I wasn't to concerned about the links being dead vertical as viewed from the front of the car. The hiems are at the theoretical center of their travel, too. With that in mind and a couple of really gnarly hits already under their belt, I'm pretty confident that I'm not going to be breaking stuff.... We'll see.

What did get me though is the diagonal slant when viewed from the side of the car. On compressing the front spring the links move upward AND rearward more than I thought they would. Rearward, that is. I think if I move my lower link holes down and aft a bit and straighten those links up vertically when viewed from the side they will do much less moving of the links and quite a bit more moving of the shock...

 

These are the Total Performance ones.

Posted using the Full Custom H.A.M.B. App!

 

...Which are in turn about a forth generation recast of Chassis Research parts from the late fifties. By the way, these can be made a LOT more functional by simply sliding a longer stud into the base, and doing a valve spring and keeper like my units. I have a buddy locally, "Modified Roadster" that was running those and complaining that they looked great but did nothing. I gave him a handful of spring and retainers and a shopping list for the nuts and bolt warehouse and life was much better afterward!

 

Chip, have you even considered short tube shocks? I noticed a BIG difference, when I went from friction to tube shocks.

 

Thanks Chip for your above comments and the pictures and how too accomplish something without the use of a machine shop. I'm one of those home builders that , although a X Panelbeater with my hand tools, I only have a drill press, grinder/sander and a beltsander to use to try and accomplish the things my brain tells me I need to accomplish to finish my car. Oh yeah I have a tig and a compressor that was used when the Ark was scrapped for fire wood.

I too tend to be more interested in checking out the more home grown cars over the cheque book professionally build ones at a car show and would rather see chipped paint, discoloured exhaust, worn upholstery over a trailer queen anyday thanks. Our hot rod certification system we have down here in NZ makes our cars safe etc that one should be able to pick somebody out of the crowd at the supermarket car park and they should be able to drive your car easily and safely.

 

I remember it well, Pretty sure it was Frieburger, one of the few times his writing really cracked me up.

 

My take is a little different. The stuff that really turns my crank, and that I really hope to someday emulate, is period stuff built built by the "Butteras" of the forties and fifties, the Kurtis' Vancichs, Spencers, Hagemans and Ingles. In hot roddings infancy, there was a LOT of crossover between indy car and road-race builders and the more sophisticated hot rods of the era, and alot of the work, while done with period tools, equipment and techniques, was very well engineered and sophisticated. Thats the stuff I really like to look at. As a young man, I trained and worked as a machinist, and have always dreamed of the day I would have enough shop space for a lathe and a mill, that time is now close at hand. Everybody likes to carry on about the crudity of some of the cars of the era, no-one ever really seems to want to talk about the really GOOD stuff, and there was a TON of it.

 

No doubt, some of those early builds were way before their time.

 

i remember that...
hell, near everything I own is " car guy safe " or worse.
I do technically own a safe car, but it's the wife's.

 

Well, I feel safe in mine. The keys have never made my air bag deploy or not deploy and I'm not being sued. Must be doing something right.

 

Huh, well I've never seen it do that before... Click on expand to see what I wrote above.

 

Chip
I just scored a 1963 1/2 Falcon Sprint. It is a project but it is all there!!!!!

 

Sweet. I am still jonesing for a '63 fairlane 2 dr sedan, but I have too many cars already. No, really, I KNOW theres no such thing as "too many cars" but I have too many. Either that, or my lot is too small for my garage...