407 replies to this topic

[RexKrazy]

is that a 2 or 3 axis machine?

<------Jealous

Edited by RexKrazy, 10 July 2007 - 02:57 PM.

[firstgencrx]

Day 12:

Well, I am sitting here drinking a large glass of Hot Chocolate. I no, I no, the whole world is on fire and I am drinking hot chocolate! I needed something smooth and comforting after the day I have had.

Today was a great day! I did not get to everything I wanted to finish, but it still was a great day. It took me all day to figure out how to use this machine, and let me tell you, it was harder than I thought.

I have to give major kudos to all of the CNC guys/gals out there in the world, what they do is not easy. I have been an ultra precision, prototype machinist now for over 25 years. When it comes to machining, I feel very good about myself. Not to sound like my head is too damn big, but I meet very few people that can do what I can do. But today I felt like I was starting all over. I was a little baby. I have a renewed respect for the people of numerical control. This is a lot harder than it looks!

I started my day without a f*&cking clue what I was doing, but now I am crawling! The Anilam controller on this machine is fantastic. It has a conversational feature that allows you to program it without knowing a thing about G and M codes. If it wasn't for this feature, I would not even be this far.

I managed to get my program figured out and adjusted for putting the pockets into the bottom of the top discs. I practiced on a piece of scrap until I had it right.

Here is a photo of the machine cutting away on my scrap piece:



At one point, the machine got away from me. Here is a photo of a milling cutter I destroyed:



This is what a good cutter looks like:



Here is my practice piece with the corner where my cutter just mysteriously made a mad dash for the edge! Trust me, it wasn't the machines falt :



I am finding that there is no room for error with this thing. The machine does exactly what you tell it to do. If I make a mistake in my programing, it will make my mistake! Or at least try to!

Anywho, tomorrow I babysit it all day. WE NEED PROGRESS!!!!!!!!

Take care all,

David

[firstgencrx]

Either you have some VERY large hands, or those are a lot smaller than I first envisioned them .

They look really nice regardless. Looks like I need to ask you to add my name to your list of potential buyers...if it isn't already filled up.

Jay

Hi Jay,

No, my hands are actually medium to small. The discs are machined from 4.5" solid round 6061-T6. I kept them as small in diameter as I could so they wouldn't interfere with other stuff like the windshield wiper motor. One of my prototypes was a little larger in diameter, but I thought it looked like crap.

I can put you on my list, but it will have to be for the second batch. For the second go around I am making 10 sets. I have already got commits for more than half of the second batch! I plan on making and keeping these in stock. It appears I will be selling all that I make for the first few runs. At some point, I should be able to catch up and get ahead of it all. Thanks to automation!

Take care,

David

[firstgencrx]

David,
Just curious about the anodizing you will be doing. Is it an simple or difficult process? Do you have to do it in a batch or one at a time and are there extra costs associated? Can any of this initial batch be anodized? JS

My anodizing is on a very small scale. The process is very simple and completely within the means of a handy person. The chemicals used are very caustic, so you need to be careful when working around this stuff. The main anodizing tank is 15 percent Sulfuric Acid by weight in distilled water. My set up will be able to anodize one set of plates at a time. The total time for the process is about 1.5 hours. Most of that time is just babysitting it. You can easly do something else while it is all cooking in the tank.

All of my plates will be anodized. It would be insane to leave out such an important step. The environment under the hood of a car is very hard on Aluminum. My first batch of five will be clear, but my others will have the option of clear, blue, red and black. Black is the hardest color to do. Black is also the most common color people want.

As far as cost, it is not cheap to get it all started, but after you get the initial thing set up, it is cheap to keep going. I will have about 400 bucks into it before I have it working the way I want it to. I plan on making other parts out of Aluminum that I will sell to others. I felt it was worth it to provide this kind of feature for my stuff.

Take care,

David

[toxicshit]

nice progress and yes black annodized would be greath

[firstgencrx]

is that a 2 or 3 axis machine?

<------Jealous

Two axis. Don't be too jealous, it is an older machine that will need some serious love here in the near future.

David

[firstgencrx]

Day 14:

Well, it's the 14th day I have been working on this project. Sorry I didn't post yesterday but I could only put a few hours into the project. I had to deal with an unexpected interruption.

The top discs are finished! Tonight I start writing a program for the CNC to make the pillow bearing mounts. Tomorrow I will machine the pillow bearing mounts and hopefully finish them. Man! This first set is getting close! The rest of the parts I need to make are simple compared to what I have been doing.

Here are some pics of the finished plates. Sorry no photos of the parts being machined while on the CNC mill. I was so focused on making the pockets today, I simply forgot to take a picture. Tomorrow I will not forget!

Top disc fresh out of the jig:



All the top discs finished minus deburring:



And this photo is for Jay:



Take care all,

David

[tegrolla666]

cool stuff, bump

[firstgencrx]

Day 15:

Found a problem with my pillow bearing mount design today. After finishing up the first one and getting one into my hands, I felt the way I made it was not good enough. So I have shifted gears and I'm going back to an earlier design. I'm going to still incorporate some of the benefits of the sandwitch idea to hold the pillow bearing better than a snap ring. I would show pictures of what I felt was not quite right, but it is hard to see unless you have it in your hands.

This is a good thing! I want these first sets to be trouble free. What I am going to end up making is a little more work, but my intuition says it is what I should do. And I learned a long time ago to trust my guts.

Anywho, I do not want this post to be a waste, so I am going to try and answer a common question people PM me about. The question is how much negative caster/camber can I expect from these plates?

The answer is simple. My plates bolt onto the top of a stock shock tower, no modifications needed. How much adjustment you can get is limited by the opening at the top of the strut tower. This opening is 62mm in diameter. The factory locates the strut shaft in the center of this opening and it's held in place by the big rubber bushing at the top. Again, this opening is the limiting factor of adjustment.

My plates will allow you to move the shaft off center up to 20mm anywhere in that opening. This is the maximum distance off center you can adjust without causing interference between the strut shaft and the opening. Trust me, you do not want that!

Today I took more precise measurements of the distance between the center of the lower ball joint and the center of the pillow bearing mounted at the top where the strut shaft passes through. It turns out the stock distance is very close to 600mm. I assume most of you are going to be lowered up front about an inch, so this distance now becomes about 575mm. I made a simple drawing using a stock strut and knuckle to illustrate what I am talking about:



If you move the top of the strut off center by 20mm, the knuckle will pivot at the bottom at the lower ball joint. This makes an angle that can be expressed as the arctan of (20/575). The equation looks something like this:



Now, what I have determined here is a simplification of what is really going on. In reality, the 575mm distance shortens and lengthens as you drive and the lower ball joint is attatched to the end of an arm that swings in an arc. The system in reality is very dynamic and much too complex to explain here. But, we can use the equation above to get a general description of what is happening (that was for the Physics majors in the group, of which I am one).

So the most you can expect from ANYONE'S plates, not just mine, is plus or minus 2 degrees of adjustment. Kakabox was kind enough to point out that an additional 1 degree of negative camber can be picked up by using the Integra lower arms. I did a simple calculation and he is correct. So, by combining my plates with the Integra lower arms, the most negative camber you can expect is three degrees.

The only way you could get more camber is to chop off the top of the strut tower and enlarge the opening at the top.

I hope this helps! Oh, I almost forgot, tomorrow I go to a funeral. So I will not have much, if anything to show untill Monday.

Take care all!

David

[kakabox]

Well done, great tech...love the "illustration"!

Thanks.

So, by your calcs, a caster gain (positive) of ~2 degs should also be possible.

[bobdragster]

Can I get a what-what?

[firstgencrx]

Well done, great tech...love the "illustration"!

Thanks.

So, by your calcs, a caster gain (positive) of ~2 degs should also be possible.

Yes! But also know that as you get more caster, you get less camber. Here is another way to think of it; if you adjust the pillow bearing to locate the strut shaft to the edge of the opening in the top of the strut tower, the negative or positive caster/camber will be relative to where you rotate the top disc of the plates. So at full camber, you have zero caster change. At full caster, you have zero camber change. Did that make sense? Here is a drawing I made looking down on top of the strut tower:



*****EDIT 7/15/07*****

My drawing above is not very good.

The strut location at the top should say "-2 degrees camber, 2.5 degrees caster."
The strut location at the far right should say "0 degress camber, 4.5 degrees caster."

This is simply because the stock caster is 2.5 degrees to start with.

Thanks Kakabox for clearing that up!

******END EDIT*******

You can see from my crude picture the strut shaft is shown in the four extremes of caster and camber relative to the stock center location. As you rotate the shaft around within the opening, you gain caster as you loose camber. Again, it is the opening at the top of the strut tower that limits us. Hopefully I didn't get my caster/camber pos/neg mixed up!

I hope that helps. Take care,

David

[kakabox]

^
In your diagram above you show 0 deg caster...is the oem caster setting zero deg? Wouldn't you get whatever caster the oem suspension geometery gives you at the -2 deg camber that you show?

[firstgencrx]

^
In your diagram above you show 0 deg caster...is the oem caster setting zero deg? Wouldn't you get whatever caster the oem suspension geometery gives you at the -2 deg camber that you show?

Yes, I am being lazy again. The factory manual says there is 2.5, +/- 1 degree of factory caster. I was trying to say that my (or any other brand) plates would be limited to only +/- 2 degrees of change inside the stock strut tower opening.

The factory manual also says the stock camber is -0 degrees 10 min, +/- 1 degree. That plus or minus 1 degree of camber seems darn wide open if you ask me.

Sorry I wasn't very clear. I made an adjustment to my earlier post above. Take care.

David

[firstgencrx]

Day 16?:

Today was a good day. I got the back broken on the pillow bearing blocks. Here are some pictures of the blocks in the mill:

Milling a step with rounded corners. "Look Ma, No Hands!"


Chamfering the top hole. GOD I LOVE MY CNC!!!


And of course, the day would not be complete without a boo boo:

Opps!


I'll have to machine that out of there later.


Lots and lots of parts!


One up close, still needs the bore for the pillow bearing


Hummm, they fit! I must have done something wrong. Just kidding.


^Look TJ, no hand finishing square corners!

If all goes well, I hope to finish the pillow bearing blocks tomorrow.

Thanks for all your patience eveyone! Take care,

David