Stop and Turn

I’m currently running two projects so today was mostly spent, clearing the engine bay of the 1275GT Mini, to try and get it ready for repair and painting.  the main issue being that someone in the past has spilt brake fluid around the master cylinders, this has lifted the paint and corroded the bulkhead…. not terminal… but not the sort of thing you want to leave un treated… so after stripping out the cabling, master cylinders wiring (although it did take 2 hours lying on my back in the footwell struggling to get the split pins out of the Master cylinder Clevises) and all the ancillaries I attacked it with a rotary brass brush.   Still you’d rather hear bout the Sabre I suspect.

On Friday night when I was Andy’s I picked up some Aluminium blanks for the front and rear bell cranks, and the dimensions of the push rods.  So I spent 45 minutes knocking up a spacer for the   bell crank hub as I don”t currently have the bearings, and then mounted up the bell cranks, I also tacked up a pushrod  to 560mm in length, and fitted some of my now vast collection of rose joints.  All of this meant that I could fully assemble the front right lower suspension.  The ali blanks are what were formerly used  in the production car, but they didn’t stand up to the load, so I’m currently waiting for some later cut steel ones.  Having said that the geometry is right, and it allowed me to model the front suspension Kinematics.

The  point of all this is to finally locate the steering column, specifically to allow a double  offset UJ to be installed. 

The good news is  I think I’ve found a solution.   If I shift the column about 1″ to right I can offset the column, and now with a working front suspension I can check that with it in this position that the pushrod never clashes with it.

You can see here that the column is now nicely offset and a short second link can now be fitted between it and the rack to remove the spear effect I talk about in a previous post.

Moving the bellcrank through about 6″ of travel I can see that the column nevers gets within 10mm of the pushrod, and then only in absolutely full droop, which is only ever achieved when the car is on the jacks, so with the car on the ground and the suspension loaded up we should be fine.  Excellent, I can now get on with welding in the bosses to take the steering bearings… and with the wheel fixed in space, the  gear shift, pedals and all the bits of the hands, arse, knees, feet and eyes relationships that contribute to driver comfort can start to be finalised.

Talking of pedals I’ve started welding up the brake pedal blanks.   Tigging in the tube was a bit hard, and unsuprisingly the tube has distorted slightly so that the bearing tightens a bit as it runs through so I will need to ream it back to size on the lathe.   Here’s a pic its currently about 60% done.