Liquifire #621, Part II, Take III

[DeereKid9]

And, your tunnel protectors are backward. You have them end for end.

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[JoeRainville]

Grumpy,

Thank you for pointing out that I did not have all 3 of the pawl return springs installed, but the pic was taken during the rebuilding process. No worries, all three were properly installed before finishing the recoil:



I then had to call in Grumpy's favorate groupie, Cari Deerest, to lend a hand flipping the chassis over:



I hope to have the chassis basically complete before Kudla visits 2 1/2 weeks. Might need his help to safely get this thing off the saw horses...

[80spitfire]

Looking great Joe! I too hope to see you finish this race before Kenny kicks the proverbial bucket! lol

-Brian

[JoeRainville]

Thanks Brian. I am also trying to make the sled a little more crash tolerant this year, and will do a better job securing all the fuel lines too.

...and back to our story, already in progress...

With the chassis upside down, I put a moving blanket across the tunnel to keep the studs from scratching the shiny black finish:



I used an empty tub to hold the track up while I installed the drive axle with all the bearings, flanges, etc:

[JoeRainville]

This step reminds me how much a pain it can be to remember the proper order of installation of the drive axle. On the chaincase side, you first have the cork gasket, outer bearing flang, bearing with an o-ring, outer flange, then the aluminum spacer. The bolts come in from the chaincase side:



Getting the bottom nut and washer on is a little tricky, but not too bad.

On the clutch side of the sled, the aluminum spacer goes between the bearing flanges and the chassis. The retaining bolts go from the inside of the tunnel out toward the speedo drive. The top one can be tricky to install, so I insert the bolt partly in and rotate the bearing assembly, and then put the last two in. Then a screw driver can be used to push them home.

Next up is re-assembling the suspension after correcting a few small issues I found:

[JDXspec]

Getting the bottom nut and washer on is a little tricky, but not too bad.

Have you learned Nothing from the factory racers? weld your nuts to the bearing flange! Makes it easier to install the drive shaft

[JDT]

OUCH!!

[ICCSF 108]

I won't mention the extra part.. can't believe knowone else saw it??

Grumpy

[Matt]

I won't mention the extra part.. can't believe knowone else saw it??

Grumpy

Extra parts are just a bonus.

[JoeRainville]

I won't mention the extra part...
Grumpy

Grumpy, you do in fact see an extra part from stock.

I use an extra aluminum spacer from the speedo drive end of the drive shaft to beef up the chaincase lower bearing mounts. Adding the aluminum spacer holds the flanges in compression to the chain case. The result is a stronger assembly and flanges that don't bend. This does prevent you from welding nuts onto the flanges to ease assembly, but it make the driveshaft assembly more tollerant to rock hits for a very small weight penalty.

I have reinforced several area's of the sled besides this, including adding 2 more rear axle wheels, larger tie rod ends, with a steel tie rod, installing a front skid plate and chaincase guard, grade 8 bolts, etc, to make sure the sled can handle rock/tree hits better than last year...



Even with all this damage, the sled still finished the 150 mile VC a week after the I-500.

Later Liquidator,
-Joe

[JoeRainville]

While I have been working on some of the small suspension issues, I also needed to do something with the front bumper. I had a few other bumpers, but I also wanted to try to straighten the crumpled one. What started out looking like this:



With some heat, blocks of wood and a 3 lbs hammer ended up looking better. Not quiet good enough for a restoration, but OK for a race sled. This was also practice for straightening out the other 3 bumpers that had smaller, but noticable issues.

[JoeRainville]

Since I had several bumpers to work on this weekend, including three from 80-84 Liquifires and one from a 340/s, I figured I would try Brock's method of removing decals. Instead of decal & adhesive remover and scraping, I applied heat to the back side of each bumper:



And pulled the tape right off, including most of the adhesive:

[JoeRainville]

After sandblasting the old coating off, three bumpers were dropped off for powder coating:



They should be ready to pick up on Friday, the 22nd. I also have some help driving in for the weekend. Tim Kudla is stopping down for the weekend, and has offered to help wrench on my many projects. Great to have friends visit, better when they lend a hand

-Joe

[JoeRainville]

Kudla showed up Friday night (Nov 22nd) for the weekend. So, being the nice guy that I am, put him to work on the Liqufire. It took both of us to wrestle the front bumper into place, good thing I had help:



The final product didn't come out too bad, considering that is the same bumper I mangled in the VC:

[JoeRainville]

The rear skid was pretty straight forward, basically just a re-assembly job and a few small fixes. The arms looked good after powder coating, but the one issue I have with that process is that it tends to fill in holes and make them smaller. Tim tried to clean the top front shock bolt out with the drill, but I ended up having to use good old sand paper:



The finished skid looks like it has more updates that it really does. For the first Vintage I-500 back in 2011 we added a front coil over shock, a Carver custom build rear shock, a 4 idler wheel set up for the rear axle, and for last year I installed a "Watersboy special" modified front idler kit. The original cross shaft would have hit the front shock, so Kenny separated the mounts. Other than that, she is all Deere:



After looking at it, I should have had the slide rails powder coated too, but it's November already...