04.22.08
Posted in Disasssembly at 12:00 am by Administrator
A big chunk of today was spent removing the bushings from the inboard ends of the diagonal arms. These were the original rubber bushings and they were a pain to get out. Despite the fact that the rubber bushings are pressed in in two parts and the metal bushings are also installed in two parts, they couldn’t be pounded out with a mallet. The rubber had to be cut out and the metal parts had to be pried out with a vice grip. Eventually, they did come out clean but it took a bunch of time. I’ll be replacing these with urethane bushings.
More time was spent removing the roller and ball bearings from the outboard ends to the diagonal arms. I’m going to replace the bearings, but the spacers all look good. The stub axles were wiped clean and were put in the pile to go to the pressure washer. I also removed the three rubber mounts from the transaxle and discarded them – keeping the mounting hardware. I disassembled the throw-out bearing and clutch fork assembly from the transaxle. I’ll get a rebuild kit for these parts but they didn’t look bad at all.
One thing that did look bad was the nose cone on the transaxle. The very tip of the nose cone snapped off. The part is easy to replace when the transaxle is rebuilt, but it seems to echo the idea that the transaxle is taking a lot of abuse – probably from the motor bouncing up and down. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me though. A VW internal combustion engine certainly weighs more than the G.E. electric motor. The only thing I can think of is that, because the aft battery racks bent the center portion of the sub-chassis (under the aft transaxle mounts) upward, this may have forced the rear of the transaxle up and snapped off the piece of the nose cone. In partial confirmation, I noticed that the shifter rod – the one that runs inside the tunnel – had a nice bow in it. It will need to be replaced and it seems to be providing testimony that the transaxle has been abused by the design of the rear battery mounting system. I’m not only going to need to redesign this portion of the chassis, I amy want to give some consideration to figuring out a way to support the electric motor instead of just hanging it off the transaxle.
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04.20.08
Posted in Disasssembly at 12:00 am by Administrator
Today, I began by measuring up and sketching the main part of the sub-chassis and then drafting it up on the computer. I now have three detail drawings (forward battery tray, rear battery trays and frame) and one assembly drawing that shows the whole thing. I converted the DesignCAD (my drafting program) files over to pdf files and e-mailed them off to Mark for peer review.
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04.19.08
Posted in Disasssembly at 12:00 am by Administrator
This morning, I continued measuring and drafting the sub-chassis. I spent most of the day measuring and sketching the aft battery trays and drafting them up on the computer.
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04.18.08
Posted in Disasssembly at 12:00 am by Administrator
This morning, I picked up the VW chassis at Plastic Media Stripping. They did an amazingly good job of removing all of the crud that was on the chassis. To my surprise, the floor pans were a lot worse off than I thought. Not only had they been drilled in many places for various seat-mount configurations, they also had hundreds of pinholes. What was surprising was that I figured, with that may pinholes, the metal in the floor pans would probably be thin enough to put my foot thru. This turned out not to be the case – the metal was solid – it was just shot full of holes! It looks like the decision to replace the floor pans is going to be a no-brainer.
I trucked the chassis over to a local Volkswagen restoration company and asked them to replace the floor pans and also see if they could straighten out the threads where the rear right diagonal arm’s kingpin threads into the chassis. They said that they didn’t think that they’d have any problems with this. I asked them to use the heavy duty floor pans and not the run-of-the-mill ones from Brazil. I suspect that I won’t get them though, as they seem to feel that the Brazilians floor pans are just fine. I also asked them to remove any seat rails, seat towers, jacking points, battery hold-downs, etc and to weld up any holes that they create in removing these parts. It will be interesting to see what I wind up with. On a previous trip, the owner noted that he could get floor pans with all of the stuff removed already. His son, who took the order today, seemed to want to use a pair of floor pans that he had on hand. Hopefully, the owner will override the son’s decision when he gets back. They did comment that the media blasting job was one of the nicest that they had ever seen.
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04.17.08
Posted in Disasssembly at 12:00 am by Administrator
This morning, I loaded the chassis up into the pick-up and ran it over to Plastic Media Stripping, to have them strip off all of the old rust, paint and rubber. Then, I went home, assembled my pair of metal saw horses and positioned the Bradley sub-chassis on the saw horses. I started measuring and making sketches of the sub-chassis for Mark and managed to get the front battery box drafted up on the computer. Actually, I shouldn’t say that it’s just for Mark. I‘m going to be using the drawings as a basis for designing a new sub-chassis.
Once home, I disassembled all of the parts remaining on the VW chassis. This, for the most part, consisted of removing stuff from the rear end including the transaxle, the brake drums, the brake shoes and all parts mounted on the rear brake backing plates, the rear stub axles, the diagonal arms and the spring plates.
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04.16.08
Posted in Disasssembly at 12:00 am by Administrator
This morning, I disassembled the front end of the chassis along with the shifter, pedal cluster and brake lines.
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04.15.08
Posted in Disasssembly at 12:00 am by Administrator
Today, I spoke with the folks at Electro Automotive and they recommended the same system that Mark is looking at – a 144 VAC system., using 18 8-volt wet cells (Trojan T-860, T-875 or T-890) for now and perhaps Lithium-Ion batteries in the future. I disassembled the entire front end of the car today – coil-over shock absorbers; tie rods & steering damper; steering box and trailing arms; spiders & brakes; front beam; shifter rod; master cylinder; pedal cluster and front and long brake lines. The only hitch in the giddy-up was the ball joints in the lower trailing arms. They wouldn’t release from the spiders, so they’re in the shop as assemblies. All that’s left now is the rear end. Then, I can get the VW chassis to the media blaster and measure and draft up the sub-chassis for Mark so that we can start designing the new sub-chassis.
I did note something odd about the front shock absorbers. These are standard EMPI adjustible coil-over shocks. However, someone put a ring of metal between the bottom of the adjuster and the two pins that index the adjuster on both shocks. This ring renders the adjustment feature useless and compresses the spring by about 2 inches. what I’m wondering is — how did he disassemble the shocks to install the ring?
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04.14.08
Posted in Disasssembly at 12:00 am by Administrator
Today, I had the help of a couple of landscapers (who had been hired to fix a leak in the main water supply to the house — sigh…), and we pulled the motor. Afterwards, I got the transaxle and two half shafts out, disassembled a part of the brake system, and removed the pot box.
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04.13.08
Posted in Disasssembly at 9:00 am by Administrator
Today, I removed the sub-chassis from the Volkswagen chassis. This was fairly easy to do, but required moving the jack stands around a bit. The sub-chassis is bolted to the main (Volkswagen) chassis in 6 places. There are 2 U-bolts around the lower beam tube at the front end, there are 2 U-bolts around the rear torque rod housings and there are two brackets that connect the sub-frame to the two lower mounting bolts for the transaxle. The frame is going to need to be redesigned as I was able to identify at least three structural flaws in the factory’s design.
First, The front battery box hangs cantilevered in front of the chassis and the rear battery trays hang cantilevered beyond the rear of the chassis. This made the frame bow up longitudinally (fore-to-aft) in the center — under the floor pans. As a result, the bottom flanges of the two main C-channels buckled slightly — not to the point of catastrophic failure but enough to warrant a redesign. I suspect that the buckling occurred as a result of dynamic loads (car bouncing along the road) and not static ones.
Second, there is a small cross member (angle iron) near the rear of the car that is bolted to the aft ends of the transaxle support forks via a pair of small 1/8-inch-thick metal brackets (see photo). The cross member bowed up in the center (between the transaxle forks) — probably because the aft battery racks were pulling down on the ends of the cross member.
Third, there are a pair of diagonal braces that support the aft ends of the rear battery racks (already removed when the photos were taken). They run from the aft outboard ends of the two battery racks up to the tops of the rear shock towers. Both of these braces were snapped off at the shock towers.
I’ll need to give the redesign some pretty good thinking. I may also want to see if I can incorporate mounts for the seatbelts and seat positioners into the frame instead of just bolting the belts and positioners to the floor pans. In the meantime, I’ve got all of the VW chassis parts to recondition.
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04.12.08
Posted in Disasssembly at 7:00 pm by Administrator
Fellow cyclist and Personal Trainer Ray Christian came over and helped me lift the body off the car and set it down on the concrete. That’s all we did today. I rode the Red Rock Loop Road for the first time this year with Ray and a friend of his. It was a great ride..
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