Drive - A Memoir 59th Installment
For
the next couple of weeks we put every spare minute in working on the
Whiz Gizzy. The fabricating was fun, the inventing (figuring out how)
was fun, but looking through all the junk piled up around the farm to
find a piece of metal that could work, wasn’t fun at all.
“I’ve
calculated that we should cut the frame here,” I directed, pointing
to a spot by the back of the front seat and in front of the leaf
spring connector clevis.
“Then
how can we make the suspension work?” Russ asked.
“We
could cut each of the leaf springs that we took off the car and clamp
the cut end to the frame with two of the 4 inch square ‘U’
clamps. Instead of having a full spring with all the weight we would
have a half spring carrying half the weight.” We cut; fit,
refigured, cut again, clamped, bolted, burned our fingers, skinned
our knuckles and swore until the half springs were installed to the
differential and the frame. Next came the proposed traction masters
making a triangle design to keep the Whiz Gizzy’s rear end from
rotating when we applied torque and welded them in place. We’d been
trying to think through how to make a drive line short enough. There
was a problem: making a typical drive shaft was impossible. Because
of the way we did the half springs, the drive line had to be able to
increase and decrease its length an inch or two as the spring moved
up and down. We found a power take–off shaft that was on an old
piece of farm equipment that had short radius universal joints and a
solid square shaft inside a square tube shaft allowing it to slip in
and out. Just what the doctor ordered.
“This
PTO will work as our driveshaft if we can weld the yolk of the
transmission to this part and weld this part to the rear end plate,”
I told the Old Man as I pointed out the places to weld on the PTO
shaft I was holding.
“I
don’t know,” was his response as he went back to his work. Vernon
hardly ever told us how to do anything the first time we asked. He
made us work out all our problems ourselves and most of the time we
could. However, he was interested in what we were doing and would
watch when we were working on a project. When we were doing something
wrong, he would show up. “Okay dumb heads,” he would always say.
“This is how you hold it straight so when it’s welded the
finished shaft will balance and grind here and here before you weld.
Weld in layers, cleaning out the slag between each layer. Here, give
me the stinger, I’ll show you.” It was at these times we would
learn how to do things most adults couldn’t do. The Old Man would
explain the
500 more words tomorrow
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Comments