Australian Belly Tank

[SPARKY]

Why do you need the frt axle wishbones?

[grumm441]

I'm just sitting here reading away
Checked my email
The guy who owes me money has just gone into administration
I better get on with that motor
G

[Dr Goggles]

Why do you need the frt axle wishbones?

Were I to build again Bill I'd most likely use a much heavier front axle and leave it unsupported, however, this one is 1/4wall CDS , without the wishbones we'd have a front end that would swim....... with the extreme castor, low ride height and zero suspension every time we hit a bump it would be talking in tongues and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be poetry

[SPARKY]

 SAR  deleted 

[Dr Goggles]

SAR  deleted 


straight outa my old mans lexicon,

I took the cautious route there Bill, thinking " have I missed something here" when what was really happening was you were looking at our spaghetti axle and wondering whether it actually supports the weight of the car let alone keeps the front wheels pointing in the same direction.......

I got the steering column sorted and got the wheel on yesterday, after a tangle with the buffer......there's bound to be some excitement when you take something like this...


near a rag-wheel

anyway the new column is a lot more compact and will allow the tach to sit lower , it also has eliminated a little movement in the column which can't hurt.

Now I can confess that this job was forced upon me as I had a little "disassemmbly" problem with the old column , I'm glad it happened because I wouldn't have tackled it otherwise........ I was also reminded that although the whole footwell area looks fairly simple that there is precious little room to move components around. Tonight I need to do a prelim wheel alignment after shifting the steering box a good 3/8ths of an inch , great

[SPARKY]

packaging, packaging  ----successful special construction cars are all about packaging 

[Stainless1]

packaging, packaging   ----successful special construction cars are all about packaging  

Bill, I knew you would pick packaging over purdy...  


edit... my SAR

[SPARKY]

LOL 

[Skip Pipes]

That wheel is pure art, well done.

Skip Pipes

[bvillercr]

That wheel is pure art, well done.

Skip Pipes

Very nice, is it upside down?

[debgeo]

of course it is in Australia 

[Dr Goggles]

of course it is in Australia  

hey you should see how toilets work here....

Very nice, is it upside down?

Na, due to the tight nature of our cab the steering column has to come between yer knees which are just below your eyeline, that slightly flared out shape is easier to grab when your elbows are resting on your hips.

No I'm not exagerating. Anyone with a special construction car with a reclining drivers pos will know this...getting comfortable is one thing, being able to see is another useful aspect and then being able to stop your helmet resting on the roll bar padding anywhere is a stipulation..........So, sit with your back against a wall, pull your knees up and then slide your backside away from the wall until your eyes are just looking over your knee caps, then hold your elbows down in the bend at the top of your thighs , that's our driving position.... that's about the only shape wheel you can use in there........ The very first time we drove the car on the concrete runway at Mangalore it was getting serious air, at that point we had a pretty rude seat, the landings weren't comfortable, last year I took a short flight somewhere near the seven mile at about 190, the landing was less stressful on the bones now that we have a better seat and 1/2inch of neoprene in there..... it's times like those that you envy people with enough room to get comfortable in.

here, from April 2008 is a description of how I made the wheel....

The first wheel we had was out of a Ford Laser which here , is a rebadged Mazda 323 .They're a  very flat wheel with a flat steel centre. I cut the top and bottom off it and then pulled the sides toward me giving a shape similar to the one shown ....neat idea but it looked pretty rough even by my standards.So I bought some half inch plate from the Aluminium merchant and started sketching it out. I found a round kitchen tray the same size as the Laser wheel and used it to give me the outside edges of the grips , then I used it give me the top and bottom concaves. So at this point I had the flat butterfly shape and it was just a case of using a hole saw to cut out the "finger-grips" and to jig-saw out the rest ( unless you've got a weldable band saw you can't cut closed circles with them).I drilled the spars and then filleted them with a coarse disc ,then I just bent them over a big anvil....rolling it would have been the go but hey why walk all the way to the next room for a screwdriver when I've got this butter knife right here in front of me...

Seriously though I did make a cardboard pattern to make sure the curves I had were right ,  but mostly it was a "feel" thing, I would definitely roll it next time but apart from that I'm happy with it and true to form it came up pretty quick...'bout two hours ....then Vaughn had it for about two months...LOL

[Tman]

Strangely enough I started carving a wheel out of 1/2" AL the other day prior to seeing this. My pattern is strikingly similar!

[Freud]

This is the wheel that Jim Hume fabricated for the Target550 streamliner. It will have wooden grips and I'll look for an example of them.

The holes in the front are for pneumatic switches for parachutes and I don't remember what else.

Marlo will chew my tail for posting w/o complete information.

FREUD

[Dr Goggles]

This is the wheel that Jim Hume fabricated for the Target550 streamliner. It will have wooden grips and I'll look for an example of them.

The holes in the front are for pneumatic switches for parachutes and I don't remember what else.

Marlo will chew my tail for posting w/o complete information.

FREUD

Pneumatic switches? don't gimme that guff, that's where you plug in the iPod and the top ones are vol. up and vol.down so you can adjust it without taking your hands off the wheel, anyone can see that jokes aside that's a very nice piece that I suspect took a bit more work than my effort.

Strangely enough I started carving a wheel out of 1/2" AL the other day prior to seeing this. My pattern is strikingly similar!

Carve is the word T...I went looking for patterns and then decided the basis of what we had was what I was after.. Give yourself a flat area in the middle so you can mount some dash stuff there like a GPS and a chute switch next to that I can't make any suggestions other than I hope you luck out first time around like I did....