Got a jig made for the lower rear A arm tonight. Welded up one of them. Turned out REALLY nice!!
I SHOULD have all 4 rear A arms done by the end of the weekend!!!
Also, I found a really neat trick for prototyping A arms. If you are using 5/8" heims, the 3/4" tube slips RIGHT over the ends of the heims. So, what you do is build a C shaped bracket to tackweld to the bushing rings of the A-arm, then off of that bracket, you tack on one or more peices of 3/4" box tube to locate the upright where you need it. The nice thing about the box steel is that it can be held perfectly in plane using welding clamps, so it makes on-car prototyping possible. Once you hve the prototype arm mocked up, you then transfer that to a jig by putting the mockup on a peice of wood and build around it with 1x2 wood and drywall screws as seen below. The finished product is a perfect match to the mockup, but is perfectly flat.
Then, I played with clearancing the throttle body for the space frame and ended up boogering it up somewhat. I'll have to head to ace hardware tommorrow AM to see if theres something I can use to fix it.
Here are some photos of the latest work:
The jig I made for the lower rear A arms:
Here is the dummy arm I made up to make the jig from:
The dummy arm and the 90% finished product... turned out really nice!!!
The one thing I have left to do is weld a 3/8" steel tab to the arm for the clevis on the toe-adjustment member:
Here are some more photos of the arm:
Some of the other things I've done... Got the shifter and plate in place after relocating some of the trans tunnel crossmembers:
Started working on steering as well ( I need to put in another U joint where the rod end is located, to get the steering shaft around the exhaust)
A nifty part I fabbed up fr the porsche steering rack. This makes it really compact so I can get around the front of the engine with the steering linkage:
The rack even got cleaned up a little. Still need to change over to some rod ends or balljoints on either end of the rack though, as I really dont like the stock porsche 914 rubber bushed ends:
Looks like it'll work..