Category Archives: Materials

First CNC Parts, Class Photos

Posted by jjludemann on
Uprights

Suspension uprights, two left, two right

Getting caught up on my blogging…

Shiny Happy CNC Parts

Posted by jjludemann on

I’m getting some interest in the car from here in Thailand, but they want it SOON. So I’ve had to step up the rate of progress, even though it hasn’t showed here on the blog. Instead, I’ve been designing and designing and designing… It’s a big step from an assembly design that seems pretty much correct, to a set of drawings and IGES or DXF files that you’re willing to pay real money to fabricate. Everything has to be checked, from the load cases used in the finite element analysis to the hole clearances for every bolt.

For example, did you know that a 1/4″ bolt doesn’t go into a 1/4″ hole? The proper size of the hole is 0.257″ for a close fit or 0.266″ for a free fit. Of course, then you have to take into account the width, or kerf, of the laser beam used to cut the metal, which can be 0.01″ or 0.25mm but varies with the type of material and thickness being cut, and the laser beam is actually a cone that can be focused on the top, middle, or bottom surface of the piece. Many parts had to be redesigned for the materials and processes I’ve been able to locate in Thailand. Here it’s not a simple matter of looking up all the local suppliers on Google and giving one a call. Thailand has a great number of very small companies that rarely have websites, and even if they exist they’re mostly in Thai, which as a special favor to web search engines uses no spaces between words. Yes, you read that right. Using no spaces would be OK if there were only one way to parse a stream of Thai characters, but haha, you make joke, eh? And then if I can actually get someone on the phone, I have to communicate in Thai. Like that’ll work.

Last year I was looking for a foundry to cast aluminum uprights, and I found one (using Startpage, not Google) less than an hour from here. Their website had a Google map and everything! So I drive there, and I’m within 100 feet or so, asking motorcycle taxi drivers where the company is. No idea; there’s never been a foundry around there. I show them the address and they say oh, that’s way over on the other side of town. The person answering the phone number has no idea what I’m talking about. I give up.

On the other hand, recently one of those Google ads that look like the first links on your search actually showed me something that I needed and couldn’t find with a search: a small local company that fabricates custom radiators. So I managed to find their shop this week and got a quote for the radiator. Quote comes by email entirely in Thai. Google translate does a pitiful job of translating Thai, but I caught on the email wasn’t spam. Fantastic price, by the way. Cheaper than what I paid for a used race car radiator on EBay. I decided I didn’t really like how that one would fit, so I designed one that’s ideal for my application and figured I’d worry about fabrication later. Problem solved, yay!

The Thai racers who are interested in the project have emphasized that the price is crucial, which means more redesign. Surprisingly for me, this is the same thing I’ve heard from the people in Singapore who’ve contacted me. Sometimes it’s easy to dash off a quick machined aluminum design, but it takes a lot more thinking to do it with laser-cut steel pieces. The equivalent in steel typically ends up being a little heavier, but that’s an example of why Formula 1000 has a minimum weight rule. Laser-cut steel hand-welded into a complex component is just about free in Thailand.

Where before I was planning on making just about everything in my machine shop, now I’m looking at fabricating as much as possible at subcontractors. Luckily a friend found a large CNC machine shop not too far from here, and the guy running it speaks English and understands drawings and computer files and tolerances and clearances and everything. I’ve now received my first batch of CNC machined parts from them and they look great. Combined with the first batch of laser-cut parts and a few parts I’ll fabricate and modify myself, I now have everything to make the car a roller.

Anyway, on to today’s gallery:

Finishing the Body Master Pattern

Posted by jjludemann on

I ended up applying ten coats of SikaFloor epoxy to try to build a hard base for further finishing. Even this gave me problems, though, as it appears that the two-part urethane foam continues to expand indefinitely. Every time I would finish a section, next time I looked at it, it needed more work. For a long time I just thought my eyes were getting more demanding, but I finally realized the body buck was slowly changing shape, bulging out between the ribs. Once I figured this out, I just tried to finish the molds as fast as possible. I also installed air conditioning in this part of the workshop, and kept it running at night to avoid temperature-cycling the pattern.

If you’re thinking of doing this yourself, a better way to do it would be to just fiberglass straight over the plywood forms, using tape or something to support the first layer of fiberglass while curing. About a 3mm fiberglass shell should do it. Then use body putty right over that, using standard auto-body finishing techniques. That way there’s no foam between the ribs to push outward and mess up the shape. The only time you need foam is when you’re really sculpting something, like the sidepod air intakes. Oh, by the way, plan on about 1,000 hours of work.

After the floor epoxy there were several rounds of primering, puttying and sanding, followed by two coats of black two-part epoxy paint. This was sanded with 400, 800, 1200, and 2000 grit wet-or-dry sandpaper, then machine-polished with rubbing compound. The top layer was 9 coats of “Hi Temp Mold Release”, applied by hand strictly according to the instructions.

When I started to think about how to split up the body panels, I realized that the “horse collar” head surround would be impossible to remove when the car was finished, as it would interfere with the main roll hoop. This necessitated going all the way back to the SCCA rule book, where I took another look at the minimum cockpit opening specifications. I found that I could meet the minimum cockpit opening size with a fixed head surround, but I had to cut the “arms” off it. So, you get to see that surgery in the photos below.

Building the Body Buck: Part 2, Putty, Prime, Repeat

Posted by jjludemann on
Sikafloor

After the first coat of ultra-hard Sikafloor epoxy

Here’s where the heavy lifting begins. Many, many passes of plaster or putty, sanding, and primer. The first step was to coat the entire body in plaster, which is best done the messy way: just plunge your hand into the bucket of plaster and smear it on the body buck. Plaster is much better for filling voids than foam is. Especially the insulation foam that comes in a can. Don’t, under any circumstances, use the canned spray foam. It remains flexible permanently, and keeps slowly expanding over a period of weeks or months. If you use it, as I did, to fill voids, you’ll spend days and days digging it out wherever it reaches the surface, refilling the holes with auto body filler.

I discovered that spackling compound, made for smoothing house walls before painting, works great after the plaster. Plaster has a short working time, and you end up mixing lots of little batches when you’re filling ripples. The spackling compound goes on smoothly, you can work it just about as long as you want, it sands extremely easily, and it sands to a feather edge. I also tried gypsum, but it has the disadvantage of remaining water soluble as it doesn’t cure.

I put on a gallon of Jotun Penguard 2-part enamel filler, then found the only auto-body paint supply shop in town and discovered “sprayable body putty”, so I followed up with a couple of gallons of that, spackling and sanding between coats. About the third coat of sprayable body putty, I noticed that the body buck was swelling badly where it had been in the sun. Uh-oh. It turns out the foam expands and contracts with temperature. After that I kept the car only in the garage, never letting sun touch it. It took 2-3 weeks to fix that mistake, now using auto body filler and a double-action (DA) air-powered sander with 40 grit sandpaper, a great combination for this work.

So when I finally got that mess cleared up, I wasn’t too keen on spraying another coat of primer and potentially distorting the surface again. Instead, I went straight to an extra-hard epoxy used for floors, called Sikafloor. This is a very unusual paint as it’s intended to be used only on horizontal surfaces, where it remains liquid for a long time as it flows to become perfectly flat. I sprayed it on, almost unthinned, an “off label use”, but it worked great for my purposes.

Building the Body Buck: Part 1, Ribs & Foam

Posted by jjludemann on

Here’s what we’re building, sort of. Rather than build a CAD model of an actual assembly of stringer and rib parts, I extruded cuts into the solid model so that the slots will appear in the correct places when I make cross-section drawings at the appropriate locations. This is actually harder to visualize than you might think. I wasn’t sure it would go together flawlessly, especially since the cuts in both the ribs and stringers went to two different depths depending on the typical height of each region. I didn’t want long floppy sticking up from the cuts:

Body Buck CAD

Original 3D CAD model showing slots for assembling plywood ribs and stringers.

Fabricating the Suspension Attachment Points

Posted by jjludemann on

Hot Off the (3D) Press: Suspension Upright 3-D Print

Posted by jjludemann on

The suspension uprights have gone through a long evolution, but I’m zeroing in on the goal.

First Design: Machined Billet Aluminum

This design uses radial-style brake caliper mounting. Needed to be redesigned when someone ordered the lug-mount calipers and had them delivered all the way from the USA. Probably a Freudian slip as they’re less expensive.

Machined Upright

Second Design: Fabricated Steel

Fabricated Upright

Second design was fabricated from steel. Unfortunately, welding will eliminate the temper in the heat-affected zones. The weakening due to this is hard to predict, and can only be eliminated by heat treatment. That would mean days or weeks finding and learning to deal with a heat-treatment supplier.

Mesh Quality

Mesh used for finite-element analysis of fabricated steel upright.

Upright FEA

Finite-element analysis stress plot for fabricated upright. Strong enough, but where are those heat-affected zones?

 

 

Third Design: Cast Aluminum

Here’s the final result of literally hundreds of design revisions, ensuring that the upright is strong enough and as light as possible. This design is made possible by the new technology of 3d printing, which will be used to make the master “plug”, from which molds will be made to cast the actual part. Note that the steering arm is not an integral part of the upright, but is modeled together with the upright because the FEA runs much faster this way.

FEA mesh plot for cast upright

FEA stress plot inner

Cast Upright FEA

View from outside

Finally, the Master Copy

The upright had to be split into four pieces for 3D printing; split vertically so I can make two mold halves and remove the masters from the molds, and split horizontally to fit the 3D printer. The 3D printer extrudes hot ABS plastic in X-Y layers onto a heated Z-axis stage with 0.3mm resolution. The print is slightly rough and the parting plane is slightly warped, which will have to be corrected with auto body putty, primer, sanding, and paint. The cast aluminum blank will still require several machining steps to cut off the gate and sprue, drill mounting holes, bore the bearing hole and retaining ring slot, and mill the brake caliper mounts. Still far better than trying to machine individual parts (or even a mold pattern) this complex, which would be approximately impossible and semi-infinitely expensive.

Beautiful, huh?

One half printed in two colors to highlight the split required to fit it into the 3d printer

Set of 4

Full set of four 3d prints. The cylinder protruding in the upper left is the gate, where molten aluminum will be poured into the finished mold.

Top View

Some people get excited by shoe sales. I get excited by this!

 

 

Fabricating the Lower A-arms

Posted by jjludemann on

No, I haven’t just been sitting around the house eating chocolate, but a major malfunction in my main computer leaves me time to update the blog and get caught up on other things I should have done, like taxes. Unlike EVERY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD (except the Phillipines), even though I haven’t set foot in the USA in over four years, I still have to pay US taxes. The bright side is that California no longer considers me a resident so I don’t have to pay California taxes anymore, which is quite reasonable given that I moved out 11 years ago.

I made the mistake of turning the computer off overnight to help save the planet and all, and the next day it kept dying like someone pulled the plug. Computer shop says I need a new motherboard and graphics card, and oh, by the way, there are no new LGA 1366 motherboards for Intel i7 CPUs in Thailand and the old one will take about a month to fix under warranty. Which is understandable, given that Intel stopped making LGA 1366 i7 CPUs ages ago! Oh wait, they still make them? Or maybe not, from Intel’s website I can’t tell. At least Gigabyte’s warranty will cover their product, or maybe I just haven’t heard what their fine-print objection will be, yet. Azus, on the other hand, says my graphics card is corroded, and corrosion isn’t covered under warranty. Great plan! Make a product that corrodes, then say corrosion isn’t covered. It might be more honest to say “No Warranty”, though. The Azus graphics card was inside a warm computer (which was _almost_ never power-cycled) in an office environment for it’s entire life.  Azus is now on my Deferred Vendor List.

Anyway, on to fabricating the lower A-arms, or control arms:

Class Photo

Repeat everything four times. Final result: four lower A-arms

Building a Simple Hydraulic Press

Posted by jjludemann on

I’ll be needing a press to insert the spherical bearings into the control arms and to insert the wheel bearings into the suspension uprights, so I took a couple of hours and built a simple hydraulic press. It’s just a strong steel frame that will give a small 5-ton hydraulic car jack something to push against. It’s taller than it is wide to be able to press items of different sizes by turning the frame on its’ side. Regarding painting, I’m finding that, with modern paints, I don’t need to use primer. I just clean the metal with a wire brush on a variable-speed angle grinder, clean it again with acetone and paper towels, then spray the topcoat on directly. This gives a thin, hard coat that sticks well.

Fabricating Lower Suspension Clevis Spacers & Washers

Posted by jjludemann on

Need some spacers to keep the clevises from interfering with some of the frame tubes. Also, custom load-spreading washers that my FEA says are important: