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Old February 6th 2012, 16:11
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owdlvr owdlvr is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Canada - West Coast
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Whew! That was an interesting Sunday.

So the day started off relatively simple. Engine off the stand and ready: check. Heater boxes? check. Jack up the motor, slide it in and....wait, why won't it slide on? Hmph, splines are lined up...I know a Type-1 clutch disc fits the 901...so why is this not sliding on? After a checking a few things, I finally popped the clutch disc off and slid it onto the splines. "Ahhhh, there's your problem!" Time to clean the corrosion out of the splines...


Once the corrosion was cleaned out, I lubed up the splines with graphite and everything slid together like butter.

While I'm here, and have photos, what's the thought on this clutch disc? There are a couple of minor chips around two of the rivets, but otherwise just glazed. I'm thinking it's probably reusable...but now would be the time to swap it out if its not.


With that, it was on to making the truss bar mounts. This took a fair bit of time, testing and tweaking, and test fitting some more. Both the left and right rear truss bars extend off the upper mount about 2" before the eyelet bolts on. I did buy the material necessary to make longer bars, but the angles just mean I'm going to be interfering with the heater boxes. The mounts I made are 5mm plate, and while the photos don't show it, they were later boxed to make them as strong as possible.




The top bar going across between the two shock mounts is going to be replaced today with a piece of 1" chromoly tubing. The threaded ends from the current bar will be cut off, turned down on the lathe and welded into the ends. Once I get the final engine and heaterboxes (might could use a replacement) in the car, I hope to do the same with the lower bars as the chromo should be stronger overall. Now, with all the fears of snapping my upper shock mounts off, I did start to look at the potential for the forward facing bars. I really don't think there is any possibility of sending a couple of bars down to the torsion tube with the factory heat. What I could potentially do, however, is run a set of bars over to the frame horns, just above where the parking brake cables exit the frame horn. I'm not sure there is enough benefit to warrant putting them in. The bars would essentially be running Left-Right, just going down to the frame horns instead of all the way across. They would be in addition to the other three, so I anticipate some benefit...but is it enough?

Last step for the weekend was to triple check everything clears, even thought I had been checking as I worked. Here's the clearance with the suspension under full compression. Some of the photos show the bump stop just touching, but I did jack up each side until the bump stop compressed enough that I was lifting the car and engine.





While checking the clearances I discovered a gross miscalculation i had made while setting up the coil-over shocks. A problem which had me Googling and surfing for potential solutions for quite some time. When I installed the shocks I knew I would need to reinforce the lower shock mount, and modify it to fit the shock eyelet better. I remember at one point a friend said to me "are you sure the shock will clear the CV boots?" to which I replied yes. Apparently I didn't check it closely enough!


You can clearly see at full compression there is no possible way that CV joint is going to survive. So this presents two major issues for me. 1) what the heck am I going to do for a solution, and 2) if I messed this up so badly...what else did I screw up? First up was about 3 hours of surfing, both in the Germanlook Forums, and the Class-11 Baja forums to see what solutions I could find. Class 11 used to require that stock lower mounts were used (guys would cut them off, and reweld them to the control arm) but the rules were later changed to simply requiring the shock be mounted to the trailing arm. Now they box their trailing arms and mount the lower eye to the top, and the upper eye inside the car on the cage. Well, that won't help. Fortunately here on the GL forums I found a New Zealand race car that solved the issue by putting all new mounts on the bottom, and then for the really trick piece, used center-driveshaft CV's to solve the clearance problem. Some time spent with cardboard, running the suspension up and down and lots of measuring confirms that I will be able to solve my issues in a similar manner...but I'm going to see if I can't get the car on a lift to make it easier.

Knowing that there is a straight-forward solution to my problem, I was able to return to the garage with an objective mind. I started at the front of the car, and literally went over the car from front to back inspecting and rethinking every job I've done to date. Nothing was left without scrutiny, everything was moved throughout it's full range of motion...double and triple checked everything. Thankfully I didn't find any other mistakes! Well, at least mistakes that I can recognize at the moment! :P Whew!


So I ended my Sunday going back to the books to see if I could come up with some ideas on how to change this bar setup over to double-shear. For a couple of the mounts I don't think it's going to be too big of an issue, but four of the six are going to be quite challenging. Now that I've missed the best winter TSD rally, and I'm likely to miss the ice racing series, it does relieve a bit of the stress. The first couple of months with the car are definitely going to be testing, which does leave me some options. The weakest link is now the hardware, mounted in single-shear. I'm thinking I may run the bar as is for a month of testing, where I can go hit the forest roads near home, and immediately head back to the garage. Any weaknesses in the truss setup will show up as bends in the hardware first, followed by breaking them. should the hardware show signs of problems, I'd likely order a whole new bar setup (Lanner's). If it doesn't, I could then double-shear it as a spring project before any summer gravel events.

Part of me thinks this is a great way to confirm that I either need, or don't need, a 5-bar setup. My thinking is that if the 3-bar setup is shown to have issues, I'll need to ditch the factory heat in favor of a proper five bar setup. The other half of me figures I'm missing out on the opportunity to just double-shear it all right now when it's easiest :P

At least it's starting to look like a car and less like a shell...





-Dave
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'71 Type 1 - Rally Project
'58 Type 1 - I bought an early!?!
'73 Type 1 - Proper Germanlook project
'68 Type 1 - Interm German 'look' project
'75 Type 1 - Family Heirloom
'93 Chevy 3500 pickup - Cummins Swap

Last edited by owdlvr; February 6th 2012 at 16:23.
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