'72 K5 - Greg's @MightAsWellK5 Build

[Greg72]

Greg, I think I have a better idea than what you asked to have done. I'll call you tomorrow sometime to discuss it with you since right now you should be enjoying family time and about ready for bed.

Good memory....

Thursday's are "Martini Nights" in our house.


Talk to you tomorrow.

-G

 

[Chevy305]

Good memory....

Thursday's are "Martini Nights" in our house.


Talk to you tomorrow.

-G

Let me know what night is margarita night and I'll be there to help you in a heartbeat

 

[Greg72]

Some quick Ackerman Steering Calcs.....

The upper dots represent the front axle kingpins. The lower dot represents the center point of the rear axle (basically the pumpkin center). The diagram is basically a top view of the front and rear axles....

This calculation relies on the kingpin centerline point to figure out the angles. However the upper and lower kingpins have different width spacings. Does anyone know how to account for this? Do you simply use the upper kingpin location, or do you "average" the upper and lower values??

According to my calcs, there is a 1* difference between the upper and lower kingpin (12* vs. 13*)


-G

 

[Greg72]

One more item to help with the front suspension mock-ups...... Thanks eBay!

Ford 9" 3rd member: $30.

Today is Danger's 2 year old birthday party, so I don't think much is going to get done on the truck this weekend, but maybe I can steal a few hours tomorrow...


-G

 

[4X4HIGH]

One more item to help with the front suspension mock-ups...... Thanks eBay!

Ford 9" 3rd member: $30.




Today is Danger's 2 year old birthday party, so I don't think much is going to get done on the truck this weekend, but maybe I can steal a few hours tomorrow...


-G

Tell him Happy birthday from Uncle Scott.

 

[76zimmer]

holy crap Greg, I can't believe he's 2 already....Wow.

I know you'll enjoy that day as much as he will!

 

[Greg72]

holy crap Greg, I can't believe he's 2 already....Wow.

I know you'll enjoy that day as much as he will!

No doubt. Time is flying...

Two years ago...

Tonight....

Such an amazing transformation. I love this little guy!

-G

 

[woodchk502]

No doubt. Time is flying...

Such an amazing transformation. I love this little guy!

-G

Hope all went well with the birthday party.

I have three younger kids and they all stole my heart with the first breath they took.

Though school and the bus have corrupted them a bit.

 

[mrk5]

This calculation relies on the kingpin centerline point to figure out the angles. However the upper and lower kingpins have different width spacings. Does anyone know how to account for this? Do you simply use the upper kingpin location, or do you "average" the upper and lower values??

According to my calcs, there is a 1* difference between the upper and lower kingpin (12* vs. 13*)


-G

I've been doing some reading on Ackermann and I haven't seen an answer to this either.

My thought would be to draw a line extending through upper and lower king pins. Then your lines coming from the rear axle would bisect those lines at the same height your tie rod ends will be. But that is all supposition.

 

[Greg72]

2013.02.03 - UPDATE! - MORE PARTS, LESS SPACE...

Loaded the 3rd Member and a spare yoke I had sitting around to give me a more accurate sense of the space I have to work with. Then I took the straight PHB to the workbench and sliced it and bent it to the shape of my scale model template.

Moved the end brackets around a bit, and got things a little closer to a final design...

The bend in the PHB works as designed, and gives the clearance over the pinion that I so desperately need. There is still a bit of fine tuning required.... Probably will drop the axle side mount by 1" to get more uptravel. At this point I can only get about 4" instead of 6"

This shouldn't be happening....

Overall I'm very pleased with this first attempt. I can definitely appreciate what everyone was saying about having to make small adjustments here and there to ultimately get everything to fit. I haven't built shock mounts yet, but I did confirm that I've left myself room for the lower mounts with the space that's left.


-G

 

[76zimmer]

Greg, your boy is a cool little guy, I'm sure he'll be the gleam in your eye for years to come!
Any plans for more?

 

[Greg72]

I've been doing some reading on Ackermann and I haven't seen an answer to this either.

My thought would be to draw a line extending through upper and lower king pins. Then your lines coming from the rear axle would bisect those lines at the same height your tie rod ends will be. But that is all supposition.

I think you're right about that. You probably need to pick the point on that imaginary line that correlates to the height of your steering arms. With high-steer it will be very close to the upper KP measurement, but if they are much lower, you need to account for the fact that the pivot point is changing along that imaginary kingpin axis line.

Greg, your boy is a cool little guy, I'm sure he'll be the gleam in your eye for years to come!
Any plans for more?

He had a real blast at his party... And had his first taste of M&Ms. He definitely liked those! No more kids for us..... Were both too old now, and we know that we were VERY lucky to even get pregnant the first time. He was a miracle for sure.... And he still feels like one every day. There's nothing better than that big smile I get from him as he runs across the room to hug me when I get home from work each day.




-G

 

[rdn2blazer]

Congrats on your boy's 2nd Birthday bud. Thats a great time in your life when they're that age. Enjoy it as you know, it goes by in the blink of an eye then it's gone. I miss all the past ages my boy was at. They DO grow up WAY WAY WAY to fast. My boys 11 now, it's insane, just yesterday it seems like I was holding him in my arms like a baby.

Oh, and I'm a big fan of PencilCAD myself. I use it all the time. It's fun to draw things out and design on paper IMHO.

 

[tRustyK5]

I'll third (or fourth) what everyone else is saying. MAKE the time to spend with him, and don't fall for that "quality time" myth. They remember spending a lot of time with you, they may not remember exactly what you were doing though.

It seems like yesterday mine were that age. Last night a very polite guy picked up my (almost) 19 year old for a date at 10 pm.

I've gone from kissing boo-boos and telling bedtime stories to telling her to not look so damn excited, make him come to the door, make him wait a minute or so before sending your sister to open the door and then have to get you...

PHB and everything else looks like it's coming along nicely. Good job so far, can't wait to see the next few iterations as you eventually find it's final form!

 

[folkenheath]

Happy Birthday to your son!

And good work on the bent panhard, I like where you are going with it.

 

[Greg72]

Thanks Heath!

Worked on "version 2" of the panhard setup...

Dropped the axleside mount by 1/2"
Pushed the frameside mount 2" further toward the DS knuckle to stretch the PHB length as much as possible
Reworked some of the bends in the PHB to get them a bit more tailored to the space they need to fit.

The results are better but now the frame side bracket hits the axle flange adapter on bump.... Looks like I got a bit TOO aggressive with the width.

Top View:

So..... I can push this mount toward the back of the truck by about 1-1/2" which would allow the bracketry to sit just behind that axle flange on bump. The tradeoff is that the PHB would be angled relative to the axle (from the top view) by 1-1/2" over the ~35" of PHB length. Or I could just shorten the bracket by maybe 2" and keep it parallel to the axle.

Ultimately, I could build the draglink setup to mimic that same 1-1/2" "taper" (top view) so that the PHB and draglink remain parallel, even though they are misaligned with the axletube.


The whole thing is getting closer to perfect..... I'm guessing maybe 2 more minor revisions and the PHB will be dialed-in.


-G

 

[NorCal69]

Nice work, Greg. Lots of trial and error it appears from this side of the monitor. My bet is that you'll knock this out of the park soon.


Keep up the great work.

Happy B-day to Danger, too.

 

[Greg72]

It took every ounce of discipline I had to install those rough-cut bracket plates without grinding them into perfect shape first!

-G

 

[NorCal69]

Lol, you're lucky that your heavy case of CDO didn't cause you to have an aneurysm out in the manspace..

 

[folkenheath]

Nice work.

I think if they are both parallel but angled that is fine, otherwise it's a tradeoff with angle vs length. Trading length for angle is going to depend on each situation which one does worse when cycling them up and down. But now you are getting into the 3rd dimension so 2D modeling doesn't quite cut it. You can use two seperate pencilCAD models though and mimic it. Figure out how much your axle will travel front/back during cycling, and then translate that over to another 2D model of your panhard vs draglink (viewed from above) to see how much they turn the axle when cycled up/down. Then you can compare the effects of angling them that way, vs changing the length.