Busted Sub, Part 12: I broke two nails, and that was just the start . . .

I ruined my fresh manicure! I'm kidding. No, seriously, I'm kidding.

Today was another day where I was fighting everything to get something done and I made some forward progress, but, well, you'll see. heh

The spindles are now 100% complete:

I really like these MOOG lower ball joints:

 The boots and hardware are very excellent. I expect long life out of these!

On to more interesting stuff. I figured that even if I couldn't use all 8 bronze flange bushings, I could certainly use 4 of them, even if they do get reamed off center doing it by hand. I didn't think that it would hurt one bit to have the bushing slightly off. It would get squished nicely by the bolt, anyway!

I wish the flange part was a bit wider:

 

Not bad, but not exactly what I wanted:

 I'll deal with it for now.

I cleaned up the six rubber plugs and popped them back into place:

 

 A keen observer will notice there are only three of four bolts in the holes. I managed to misplace tht particular bolt for a long while . . . Grrr!

Next,  started to fit up the new steering rack. Everything was going smoothly until I went to clamp the passenger side of the rack:

 I have a power steering subframe. The power steering rack is thicker in diameter and the bracket that holds it in place is longer.

Compare the above holes to the original subframe:

 NUTS!

Here is how much room is left in between the new Prothane poly bushing and the subframe when the two bolts are tightened on the driver's side:

DOUBLE NUTS!

For now, the easy fix is to trim the ears off the old bushing:

And use that to take up the slack space:

 For the bracket, I am going to modify it tomorrow after work. I have a pretty simple fix in mind that shouldn't take long to implement.

The last thing I did before calling it a night was to get some of the shifter bushings pressed in!

Ew:

EEEEEW!

BAM!

They pressed in pretty easily one at a time. I tried to do both at once, but they wanted to shift off line doing that. They eased right in one at a time. I had concerns that my press fit would be wrong, but, it didn't seem to bother anything at all.

I did need to send the reamer through one more time, however. The inside of the shift lever end was no where near round, so there was a mismatch in the bushing fit. One pass with the reamer later and the test fit is a success!

There is an ever so slight clearance for the bolt. I don't think that will be an issue at all.

Now I need to find the other bits from the shifter so I can finish pressing the bushings in and figure out what length bolt I need for both pieces and get the sucker put back together.

I can't find my customer shifter . . . I may just throw in a good stock shifter for now in order to test the bushings under "normal" circumstances, and honestly, I don't need to bonk the exhaust as I am actually anticipating having move the shift linkage up by creating a boxed section on top of the center tunnel of the car with the custom shifter, as the bottom of the shifter is pretty darn long. So, for now that might have to do.

That's it for now. Hopefully I'll get the darn subframe bolted up tomorrow finally, allowing me to get the rest of the suspension and brakes in. That won't take long at all once the subframe is in. I do anticipate one issue, though. One of the steel inner sleeves for the radius rod bushings is rusted to the shaft of the radius rod. I really want to get that off and clean it up before installing the new bushings. I may have to cut it off, as I don't have a torch at home and can't try to heat it up easily. Propane really isn't so good for that kind of thing.

Minor update on the shift linkage bushings

 I used a large diameter drill bit to deburr the center holes. It didn't take long and isn't difficult. It's not as pretty as doing it on the lathe, but, eh, the burrs are off.

Then I tool a file and broke the edges on the shoulders so I don't slice my fingers up handling the bushings. Those burrs were SHARP!

Now they are ready for install once I do some cleanup on the linkage itself. And I keep forgetting to measure for hardware. heh I'll get that done shortly. There are a few fastener stores near my work that I can try to find something that will work be long enough to work. These are made for an 8mm through bolt.

Shift linkage bushings are mostly complete

Yesterday I snuck over to my friend's place after leaving work early. I managed to knock out the rest of the work on the bushings for the shift linkage and shifter. Well, they aren't 100% done, but they are done with everything I need a lathe for.

I was so focused on things that I didn't bother with taking photos of the process, since I took photos the last time and most lathe work is really pretty similar. Turning, facing, drilling, reaming and parting. I'm not doing anything groudbreaking, here.

Anyway, here is the one pic I took of the mostly finished pieces:

The left bottom set is for the end of the shifter itself. The other two sets are for the yoke. There is one piece I didn't make, but I am going to see how well this works without that one piece and if it works then I won't bother having to make it right away, which is a good thing.

So if you recall, I left off with these:

 As you can see, those were not drilled and the outside of the shoulders were not faced to size. I hadn't even started the bushings for the shifter, as that was the lowest priority. My shift linkage was so bad at the yoke end, that was what I was needing to focus on, but thankfully I had the time to make them, too.

As far as the process, immediately after I showed up, I found a left hand tool holder and ground a facing tool. The tools I grind (I should take a photo of them sometime) are SHARP. This material seems to prefer a very sharp tool with almost no nose radius and not too much relief on any of the angles. Doing that and tweaking the feed speeds, I can get really decent surface finishes and take off a decent amount (at least for the size of the lathe I am using) per pass. A CNC machine could likely make all of these in the time it takes me to just face one of these things. LOL!

After I got the tool set, I faced the shoulders to size. This dimension isn't exactly precise as the yoke is thin sheetmetal that is pretty flexible. Within 5-10 thou is perfectly acceptable, though I manged to get both sides pretty close to the dimensions I calculated.

Looking at the time, I figured I could knock out the shifter bushings, so I slapped in the round stock, switched tools to the turning tool that I probably should have sharped up a bit but it worked well enough for the little bit of turning I had to do. I got the shafts turned to size, cut the bushings off the bar stock, slapped in the facing tool, faced both sides and then got read to drill and ream.

In production or at least time sensitive work, the thing that nearly always takes the most time is tool changes, so if you can eliminate as many tool changes as possible, especially if you only have one kind of tool holder for what you are doing, you can save a LOT of time. In this case, this basically meant that I center drilled all the pieces first. Dave only has one chuck, so changing the tools in the chuck takes a bunch of time. Granted, this isn't super critical work by any means, so changing the pieces out is perfectly acceptable and preferable to taking the time to mount a tool for every operation change.

So, yeah, I center drilled each piece. I then tried to drill one bushing to the just under the reamer size, but that didn't work too well at all. I read that with this bronze, it helps to grind the bit tip flatter than you would normally find on a general purpose split point bit, but since I didn't want to do that, I just pilot drilled them then got them drilled out to just under the .315" reamer size.

By all accounts, the reaming was supposed to be pretty gnarly, but, well, it wasn't. Dave helped by flooding the reamer with WD40 as we went along. We found a good, chatter free speed to turn the lathe (man, that VFD makes things so easy!) and we finished the holes to size.

In case you didn't know, reamers are for forming very precise and round holes. Drill bits actually don't make very precise or even round holes, usually with poor surface finish to boot. A reamer will make the hole very round and if you aren't rough with it, it will leave an very excellent surface finish for the hole.

We finished up and I had to skedaddle. I didn't get to chamfer the edges, which is slightly annoying but not the end of the world. I can take care of the burrs with a file. These don't have the prettiest finish, but, when these go into production on CNC machines (that's planned), they will be quite the handsome parts.

So that about sums it up for this wall of text. I hope you found some of it interesting, even with only one new picture for the whole post. heh

Busted Sub, Part 6: Incompletion and Frustration

After work, I headed over to my friend Dave's place to knock out some lathe work. Everything started well. I got to work by grinding a tool for the bronze (which needs a sharper tip to the tool than many other materials) and started dialing in the machine. If you will excuse my phone being an utter retard and flipping this video, I did take a short video but it got flipped to vertical video. I hate vertical video. Anyway, here's the video:

Edit: The video should be fixed soon. Man, I hate vertical video.

This is a rough cut with the speed actually much too low. Everything smoothed out when I slowed down the feed a tad and cranked the speed up a lot.

I was cutting it dry. I suppose I could have used some oil, but this was cutting so well, and you can see finish here:

Bling, bling:

This is where I ended for the day:

Those are the four bushings for the shift linkage yoke. As you can see, they are not drilled or reamed. The shoulders are also not faced to spec. So why aren't they done? I had to leave the premises in a rush for reasons of irrationality. That's basically all I'm going to say about the situation.

So, I won't be having any cool self-machined parts on my CRX for a while. I'll just be slapping everything together as soon as the weather breaks.