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Adoom

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Everything posted by Adoom

  1. Sounds like the same as mine? There is a lot of business going on in mine that is in the way, but hopefully you can see what is going on here. The bracket also supports the indicator. This is the right side mount.
  2. I thought I'd do some work on the poor neglected mini. I took out the subframe and welded a jig for it on my steel bench so I could cut it up and weld new bits in and have it still bolt into the car. I used the plasma cutter for the first time in years and years. After cutting it up I realised that I'd mounted it too low to fit the engine in the subframe while it's in the jig. Le Sigh. I guess I can work around that by fitting the engine in the car to ballpark where stuff needs to go then use the jig for the welding. I've since added some tabs to the jig to prevent the front mounts from turning on the bolt. Right now, the big bit of the subframe is in the paddling pool full of citric acid to clean it up a bit.
  3. So I mentioned at work that I wanted an lpg weed burner, but didn't want one $300 much. Work comrade suggested I could make a forge burner for under $100. The 'jet' is a mig tip and yes, I have used soapy water to check for any leaks. Progress so far of forge burner on a stick. Yes, I am the shittest cameraman. I was concentrating more on not setting myself on fire than aiming the phone.
  4. Well, the holesaw in the mill kind of worked, right up until I tried to push it too far and it jammed, chipped a tooth and bent the holesaw shaft. I finished it off with the vertical bandsaw and powerfile.
  5. Making a jig to align the flange on the coil over tube. Fortunately the left and right sides are the same, so I only need one jig. I'm hoping I can stand the jig on it's end in the mill and use a hole saw that is the same diameter as the tube to cut the middle out of the flange. The flange still needs milling flat, and it's 2mm too thick.
  6. And the other side is done. I took it down off the axle stands to see how it looked. The subframe MIGHT, be 5-10mm closer to the left side..... or it's a 70's British car and it's not symmetrical. I have allowed for some misalignment by not welding the mounting studs in, they are just clamped by those two cap screws. So they can be moved around a bit when it's on a wheel alignment machine, then they can be welded solid. The front is supported by the jack, no springs or coilovers up there yet. The front arches are just SO ENORMOUS. I've measured the ground clearance of the front cross member and it's 180mm........ factory height.. .. But the sump is another 50mm lower. I'm not worried about the sump since it's it's in line with the wheels. The gearbox cross member has 130mm clearance, I'm a little concerned that it might catch on those really tall speed bumps like they have in Upper Hutt. I could probably trim it down by 20mm, but the only way to make it any lower profile is replace it with a heavy bit of 10mm flar bar which just seems so crude.
  7. I needed to make the strut towers taller so they would work with the coilovers. Not shown in the photos is how I partially fabricated the new top and held it in place with wooden spacers and tek screws. Once I had it tacked together I could cut the old top off and use the teck screws for alignment. I welded the joins inside and out with it removed to make it easier on myself. I left one side off so I could see to do the indie welds joining it to the tower. Do the inside welds. Close the hole. The access to see wtf I was doing was real bad, but I also welded the back of the closing plate. No pics, but the coilover fits now and I can adjust it so it's at ride height when the spring is compressed. There's plenty more adjustment left to fine tune. Got to do the other side now.
  8. ....that gearbox adapter plate. It looks very rectangular.
  9. Plus one for these guys. Greg is a good guy and has made me a couple of clutches. I have one of their hybrid puk clutches in my Starlet behind the CA18DET, organic on one side and ceramic(?) on the other, so you get some clutch feel but it can take more power than a fully organic clutch. It must have been at least 7 years ago though. Might have been around $600 back then.
  10. The heavy oil is easy. I'll just use way oil, the stuff I have is super tacky. But I've not been able to fin out what is the difference between 'grease BB'(apparently a bearing grease) and 'grease cn medium'.
  11. The knee is REAL heavy. I wonder what the equivalent oils/greases for these are.
  12. I've got most of a full sheet of 0.8 cold rolled, but seems more like 0.7 to me. If that's a suitable thickness, let me know and I'll give you some. Adam
  13. The whittling option was referring to making a steel version of the cast lower cup thing with integral side flanges. That would be a lot of work. But the plate option welded directly to the coil over strut tube is what I will likely go for, if I get technical approval. I do know a guy who can plasma/flame/laser cut stuff, but it's only 12mm, so I'd likely just use my bandsaw.
  14. I've been taking it to bits to clean. The overarm support is really bloody hard to move, I've been using the sledge with a block of wood, then once it was forward enough, there are some holes I can get the prybar in. The part of the gib strip I can see looks suspiciously like aluminium flatbar..... Hopefully it's not. Just because they look like grease nipples on your mill or lathe, doesn't mean they are used for grease. OIL! OIL! OIL OIL OIL OIL !!!!!!!!!! No wonder it took so much effort to turn the wheels. I cleaned up the top surface and it's real dark, like black, but I can't feel obvious scoring, so I'm hoping it's okay.
  15. With the motor out, it was less hard to clean out the sump sludge. I filled two icecream tubs with all the sludge I could reach. But I think there may be a cavity at the back I don't have enough elbows for, as well as the area in front of the column. So glad it doesn't smell... Since I can't reach all of it, I've emptied about 3 litres of undiluted ExOff degreaser into it and I'll leave it for a few days. It seems to break it up quite well scrubbing with a brush, the brush doesn't become instantly packed with grease(it's possibly more like oily mud?). I'm thinking I can maybe suck it all up using some hose attached to a bucket and have the shop vac sucking the air out of the bucket. There is a drain plug on the side, but that's totally just going to make a big mess on the floor.
  16. BEST! GATEPOSTS! EVER! I'd love to make giant gateposts like that on my residential section.
  17. I just picked this up last weekend from one photo on Trademe from a guy who took 9 days to respond to my emails. It seems to be in okay condition. But there seems to be grease where I would expect oil, so the wheels are a work out to turn. And all the oiling nipples have been painted over. The inside is full of old oil and grease and dirt. So I guess I'll pull it apart enough to clean the grease out. First step. Get the motor out to find the info plate so I know what VFD to get. The motor is mounted to a rocking mount. That's bolted to this cover with a couple of threaded adjusters to adjust the tension on the drive chain. Yeh, CHAIN... The chain going off to the left is for the axis power feed gearbox. The motor BARELY fits through that hole, and it has to be at the right angle too. That big gear then goes into the column to some flat belt pulleys. I assume Everything has to come out of here to replace that flat belt. NFI how this is supposed to come apart, the manual I have is for the MK2 and 3, which are quite a bit different to my MK1. They changed to V pulleys instead of chain, and a gearbox instead of those flat belts. But I managed to get the motor out. It seems real big for 2.5HP. But it's short maybe? And after cleaning the filth off the info plate. I'll need a 400V 3 Phase VFD, it can't be wired to use 230v 3 Phase. Because the motor doesn't have separate terminals for the coils. It does have these cool looking BEES bolts.
  18. I have a requirement to unload a 1000kg milling machine off a trailer onto my garage floor this Sunday. But at the boom extension required for clearance, my engine crane is only rated to 500kg. Here is my solution. I've also moved the pickup point for the ram forward 150mm. According to online lever calculator, this would need only half the rams 7500kg capacity to lift 1200kg. I've added spacers to tighten up the legs where the locking pins are, so they are not all wobbly anymore. I'll probably also use a few g-clamps to clamp some more rectangular section over where the legs pivot. I'll put wooden blocks under it so I don't have to worry about the wheels collapsing. I'll I need to do is lift the mill high enough to drive the trailer out from under it, then lower it onto 25mm roundbars as rollers.
  19. I like this idea more than chopping up the top of the strut tower. But it sure will be a whole lot of whittlin'.
  20. I'm not sure what's going on there. How is the top hat mounted?
  21. I stripped the spare set of front struts so I can get them ready for welding. I suspect these last turned in 1971. They were EXTREMELY reluctant to turn. I had to use a punch and hit it really hard with the hammer.
  22. I made the 7mm spacer and tacked it in so it stays there.
  23. It has a rear seat again. Like a REAL car! And a seat base still fits!
  24. I split this up because I couldn't fit all the photos in one post. I also thought I'd get some weld-on coilovers or the front struts. Through pure random guessing, the first strut I looked at was for an AE86, I found out the od of the AE86 strut is 51mm. I measured the od of the Triumph strut with a micrometer and got 50.85mm. So the weld-on coilovers should fit my strut tubes. So I asked the supplier if they could get the id of the weld-on bit and the length from the top of the mounting plate to the bottom of the weld on bit when the body is adjusted as short as possible. "I need to to be no longer than 460mm". They emailed the supplier, BC in Taiwan I guess. The id is 51.1mm, so that's all good. And the shortest length was 459mm. Not stocked, order from Taiwan. But something must have been lost in the translation. The shortest length was 480. There's no way to make it any shorter. Where it welds to the original strut tube, the weld must be at least 10mm from the casting and at least one diameter length of the original strut tube must be up inside the weld-on bit. That's ~51mm, but with the damper screwed all the way into the weld-on bit, there's 55mm left for the original strut tube. I thought I could maybe turn the thread off the bottom of the damper, so it would fit down past the threaded section and into the original strut tube. But on inspection of the damper, that's not an option. Here it is with the original strut. Like this, it's actually 10mm shorter than the original strut at full droop, but on the car the original strut needs to be 30mm shorter to prevent the inner tie rod on the rack from binding. So it's 20mm too long. I thought I could probably use the same solution for the front as the rear. I'll have to modify the top plate of the strut tower to allow for the camber adjustment to clear anyway. So I chucked the bonnet back on to see how much room there is. 40mm is how much higher I could go before those nuts hit the bonnet. Will that be enough?
  25. So I thought I'd look into getting two new coilovers for the rear because the Teins I mocked up with were old and knackerd. I went with BC racing because they would sell me only the rears and they were just barely affordable but still decent quality. The subframe is from an S14 Silvia, so I'm like "sell me S14 Silvia rear coilovers", assuming, these fit, so those will fit. Not stocked, order from Taiwan. "I'll put them in today. these will be the easy ones". They were a little longer than mine when the strut body was adjusted as short as it would go. "It'll be fine, a little more droop is not a problem". Oh, damn, maybe the teins were from an S13.... The Teins are 79mm pcd and the BC are 116mm. Those big top plates also don't fit in the strut towers I made. "No worries, I'll just make new stud holes and turn down the plate". The extra holes are because I didn't notice my 11mm drill was bent and because I had to clamped down in the mill, it made a 12mm hole. Well, that problem's fixed. Now to install the coilover. This is where I plan for ride height to be. The wheel center is actually the same height as the top of the sill, but the photo angle..... Buuuuuuut, to get to that ride height, I had to wind the spring platform right down...... and the coilover is basically out of travel and on its bumpstop. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. So I was thinking that I'd have to look into different BC dampers that are shorter. The damper body is LONG, more than twice the travel. How much was this mistake going to cost me??? After working on the mini instead, so I could feel I had achieved something on the weekend. I realised.... my strut towers are totally custom fabricated, I could just make them taller! There's at least 80mm there that I can raise it and still get to the adjuster knob. The idea I had so I don't lose the reference of the strut tower top plate is to bolt spacers to the existing bolt holes, then build a new top plate off the top of the spacers as well as the top portion of the strut tower that would slide over the top and overlap the existing strut tower top. I'd then use tek screws or something to attach the new top to the old top. Then I can cut the old top off, refit the new top, using the tek screws for alignment, then weld it inside and out. Wheew! I supposed I should work out if 80mm is going to be enough.....
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