November 17, 2009 - The beginnings of a rear brake bracket.
Most of my axle uses 2.625" tubing, and it's impossible to find a 2.625" hole saw. This meant lots of grinding for my trailing arm brackets. Are they trailing arms or radius rods? I'm not really sure. Anyhow...
A look at the end of the axle tube revealed that there's a step in the tube size, dropping down to 2.5". That size hole saw I have! And with the axle removed, I can slide my bracket right over the end of the axle tube so I can get a full 360 degree weld. Excellent. The bracket is made of 0.25" steel, nice and beefy. The two mounting points for the caliper are in the same plane, so all I need to do is drill two holes in the right place and weld this on.
Well, almost. Naturally, the bracket uses 10mm metric bolts. I have a 0.375" drill, but 10mm is 0.394". I'd rather not go oversize (7/16 is 0.438") so I'll have to see what my options are for opening up the hole slightly.
The bracket also ends up very close to the end of the tube, so I'm going to put a 0.25" spacer to move it inboard a bit and get more room for welding. That'll also give the mounting bolts for the caliper a bit more meat around them to help them resist shear.
It's kind of funny - I've taken the Seven to two magazine tests over the years. One was in the company of a bunch of other Locosts, the other was to compare against a $75,000 supercharged Atom. In both cases, I was called "a ringer" because of my purported access to equipment and tools not available to mere mortals. Want to know what I've been using for all of my recent fabrication? The holy trinity of a good drill, a sawzall and an angle grinder. Yes, a MIG welder, stick welder and a torch have also recently come in to play, but they're not exactly unusual tools for fabricators. I don't even have a bandsaw. The car is on jackstands in my garage, a far cry from the bead-blasted perfect shell on a rotisserie that some people might expect.
My point here is not to say "oh, poor me", but to point out that you really don't need a lot of equipment to do this kind of work. This bracket isn't as pretty as it might be, but a bit more time with the grinder will fix that.
tags: brakes |
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