2026-01-29

Last modified: 2026-01-29 23:18:06

• Car chassis
• Car front hubs

Car chassis

The new welding wire arrived, I went and finished the welding, pretty pleased with it.

Car front hubs

I also have the spot-facing tool now. I turned the pilot down to a tiny bit over 8mm and put a bit of a spot-face on the wheel hubs. I didn't want to go crazy because I didn't want to lose too much thickness.

I could do with making the spot-face a bit deeper on the inside but the drill chuck was fouling on the centre of the hub, annoying. Unsure what to do about that.

I then started making up one of the spacers for the disc carriers (of which I need 12 for the front and 12 probably-similar parts for the rear). It was a real ballache. They need to be like 70mm long and drilling an 8mm diameter hole 70mm deep on my lathe is not fun. After a while it can only plunge like a millimetre at a time before you need to pull the drill out to clear chips, and the tailstock clamp doesn't work, so it's a nuts and bolts and spanners job to withdraw the tailstock. Every millimetre. And then when I finally drilled as deep as I could and parted it off, it hadn't even gone to the full depth. The flutes on the drill are a bit short.

I could probably drill through, but I'd had enough. And I haven't even finished 1. I don't want to make 24 of these.

So, new plan: I've ordered some tube that is 17.4mm OD and 3.2mm wall thickness, so will have 11mm bore. That is a slightly bigger bore than I wanted but perfectly acceptable. To centre it on the bolt during assembly I will press a 3d-printed spacer into each end. So I just need to cut 12 lengths of this for the front and 12 for the rear (which may be a different length), and then make 48 little 3d-printed spacers. And no deep drilling required!