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Flash's 1965 Ford Thames


Flash

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Woke up to a cloudy and chilly day today. Didn't feel like drilling holes in my strut brace mounting plates as it's pretty tedious especially when I only have a hand held battery drill to do the job with. Perfect weather for sipping cups of tea and lying on my old piece of house carpet under the Thames though, so I thought I'd crack into the stabiliser bar mounts.

During my "proof of concept" phase I narrowed my choice down to the newer Mitsi Express bar which is the bottom one shown in the picture below. The upper one is the Starwagon equivalent but it is designed to work around the older drag link steering that the Starwagon had, so was clashing with the forward facing Express steering rack that I am going to be using.

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It's not too clear in the picture above but there is a slight upward kink in the Express stabiliser bar just after the rubber centre mounts which clashes quite nicely with the angled offshoot from the main Thames chassis legs where the original front suspension cross member used to sit. Bugger !

20200722_145604.jpg

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So I'll need to fabricate a spacer for the U bracket mount in order to clear the chassis leg offshoot on either side.

The other little challenge that I have is that the U brackets have a metal tab on one end and a bolt on the other end, like so:

20200721_100938.jpg

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Looked around my other donor vans, but they all have U brackets of the same design, so easiest option is going to be to replicate the little slot needed for the tab.

I then took a closer look at the Starwagon stabiliser bar that I no longer need and it has two little uprights that look like so:

 

20200721_101024.jpg

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The plates aren't thick enough on their own to solve my clearance issue, but they will do nicely as the first part of the solution. So I fired up my little angle grinder and next minute I had two of these:

20200722_114543.jpg

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Next step was the thicker spacers which need to be about 90 mm  x 40 mm. The tricky bit is that these spacers will need clearance to allow the tab on the U bracket to sit underneath the mounting plate. The obvious choice is a bigger diameter hole, but I didn't fancy having to drill one of those through an 8 mm piece of plate.

Then I remembered that the second hand piece of 8 mm angle iron that my mate Snow donated to the project already had some nice big bolt holes from its previous life. Another win.

20200722_113445.jpg

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It's a wet old day here in Queensland. Perfect weather for a quiet day in the shed drilling holes through the 8 mm plates.

So with a bit of Boston cranked up on the sound machine to get me in the mood, I grabbed my cheap and nasty Ozito battery drill and set about the task. Followed my usual recipe of starting with a 3 mm drill bit and then going up in half mil increments until I reach 9 mm. I do one hole at a time to allow the drill bits time to cool. It's a tedious process but needs must as I don't want to over burden my drill or the bits. 

Ended up with these which are now ready for mounting. Just need to glue the thinner plates to these puppies and I can give them a whirl.

I know it's only a few crappy old holes, but being "tool challenged"  I wasn't looking forward to the process, so am super chuffed that they are done.

 

20200723_104515.jpg

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Spent the rest of the morning lazing about under the Thames. Figured I would drill a few holes  while I was under there. I managed to rustle up some random nuts and bolts from my stock to temporarily fit the strut brace mount. I'll grab some new nuts, bolts and washers when we next go into town.

Anyway, that's the right hand side done until after wheel alignment and then I'll strip it all out for a full weld, fitting of end plates and general beautification.

I'll tackle the left hand side tomorrow.

Thanks for reading. 

20200724_140212.jpg

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Well that's the left hand side strut brace mount bolted up to the Thames chassis.

And not a moment too soon as I'm definitely over the novelty of overhead drilling with hot shavings raining down like confetti.

Tomorrow I'm hoping to puzzle out a cunning solution for the stabiliser bar mounting eyelets needed  on the lower suspension arms.

20200725_132812.jpg

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I've been giving a bit of thought to how I'm going to mount the Express stabiliser bar to the Starwagon lower suspension arms. Originally I was hoping to cut the mounting ears off the Express suspension arms and glue them to the Starwagon ones, but in looking at both arms more closely the profiles don't match. Fabricating something "cup like" in shape from scratch is beyond my capabilities and I wasn't too keen to start cutting into the arms as that would be the point of no return. So I started to look at alternatives.

The Starwagon lower arms are equipped from factory with 4 mounting holes for the strut braces, two of which are used at any one time. The ones in use are diagonally opposite each other and depend on whether you are running the strut braces towards the front or the back. On a standard Starwagon the strut braces face forward, but in my case I've swapped them from side to side and they now face rearwards. This leaves me with a spare front hole towards the inner portion of each suspension arm.

Hmm, perhaps I can use that hole as a mounting point.

Scratched around amongst my stash of bits and found the shorter strut braces from the Express that I no longer need. They are nice and chunky and have two pre-drilled holes that looked to be about the right spacing for what I require.

So without further ado I bolted one into place to see if everything would line up. Looked almost spot on.

20200727_134247.jpg

20200727_134443.jpg

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Looking closer at my mock up I realised that the hole that the long bolt passes through is just too small and their isn't really enough meat to drill the hole much bigger.

So I scratched around some more and came up with the stabiliser bar out of my donor HiAce.

It has a really nice countersunk hole that is perfect for the small rubber bushes.

20200727_123650.jpg

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Only problem is that the bar is pretty chunky. But, I figured that I could maybe trim it a lot flatter with my little grinder of angles. So cutty, cutty, grindy, grindy and it didn't take me long till I ended up with two of these puppies.

20200727_123616.jpg

20200727_123553.jpg

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Didn't get a lot of free time today, but I did manage to poke a mounting hole in one of my brackets and bolted it all up.

I'll drop a tack weld onto the one of the sides of the bracket when I take the lower arms out to fit new ball joints. Just to prevent the bracket from swiveling on the single mounting bolt.

 

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