New L-Assembly Jigging and Cleaning

Today I did some more work on getting that pesky L-assembly correct (that is the annoying compound angled front suspension mounting monster that looked like this:

That odd parallelogram looking thing.  Well, if you look close you can see it was poorly made.  As it is a very important part of the car, I decided to re-do it.  To do this, I made a couple new jigs.  The first was to cut the compound angle using my single angle band saw.  The jig merely held the piece at an angle to the work surface.  Below are the jig and a couple action shots.

It worked really well.  All of my cuts were within 1 degree of the specified angle.  With that portion out of the way, I went on making a jig to assemble the L assembly.  Before I used a poorly made jig on my build table, but now I made an independent jig on some very flat MDF.  I think it turned out nicely.  You can see the tubes for the L-assembly on the jig waiting to be welded.

I modified the jig a bit more after taking the picture, I'll have some sort of a pic later on.  As you can see, the angles are much closer on this piece.  Hopefully with my friend Andy's help I will be able to get this welded up Tuesday.

While I was waiting for the bandsaw to cut tubes, I decided to clean up the garage a little bit.  Here are the before and after shots:

Before:

After:

If you look closely, you can see that the floor is no longer covered in scraps of metal and wood.  It is much easier to move around and work in a clean garage.

A couple more pictures of my equipment:
1.  My garage radio

2. My new band saw blade (the cheap Chinese one that came with the band saw finally bit the ghost)

Well that is all I managed to get done this weekend.  I'll have more updates later this week.  Studying for the Fundamentals of Engineering exam was a burden the past two weeks, but now that it is done I will have more free time!

An Old Project I Had

Sifting through the camera that I am using for this project, I came upon pictures of my old Isuzu Trooper II that I had last winter. Below is the reason I sold a perfectly running 4x4 vehicle for $400:

The frame was rusting so bad that it was collapsing.  I did drive it like this for 3000 miles though.. hmm... wonder if I should have kept this.

Tools of the Trade and Build Days 1 + 2

I'm preemptively apologizing for the low lighting quality in these pictures. My garage has very little lighting (1 60 watt bulb and two halogen floods). On to the tools!

These are my primary fabrication tools.  The welder is a Hobart Handler 140.  I'm at a rental property and was limited to 120v welders.  So far I haven't had an issue, but I may need to go somewhere else when I start welding thicker than 3/8" plate for roll bar mountings.

The band saw is from Habor Freight.  List cost was $300, was on sale for $230, then I applied a 20% off coupon to drop the price to $180.  After tweaking the blade guides, tension, speed, I have managed to make fantastic cuts down to about half a degree of precision.

Another very important tool in Minnesota winters is the garage heater.  Now, this heater is not very powerful, but it should be able to bring the garage to about 40-50 F, which is plenty good to work in.  Runs on kerosene, was given to me by a co-worker free of change.  I love free things.

Speaking of free things, see that tiny air compressor?  That was also free.  That one (with that nice hose) came from my friend Andy.  The rest of the picture are my tool boxes, chemicals, and general garage tools which will come in handy after the fabrication is mostly complete.

Now onto the build so far.  Here is the picture I took after 1 day of cutting and mocking up:

You can see a pile of cut tubes and a pile of cut tubes in the background.  This first day was mainly spent getting a feel for the band saw and measuring equipment I'm using.  The big white binder is my 120 pages of diagrams and plans.

Here is a picture from build day 2.  This doesn't look like it was a lot of progress, but the entire cab and engine portion of the chassis base is cut, measured, and tack welded together.

  

The vertical tubes you see on the chassis are going to be used to properly position that odd parallelogram for the front suspension mounting points.  precision is critical here so I don't mind making and breaking numerous welds to get it just right.  

This picture also shows my wonderful lighting arrangement.  Those two floods provide 90% of the light in the garage.  It can get a bit troublesome to see sometimes, especially as those lights cause my auto-dimming welding helmet to dim when I look in their direction.

This is all the progress so far.  Progress will be a lot slower this week as I am spending this weekend studying for and taking the Fundamentals of Engineering exam for chemical engineers.  Hopefully I can start down the long path of becoming a Professional Engineer.

Welcome to my Locost build blog

Welcome to my Locost building blog.  I hope to track the progress of the project here from start to the point where I either wreck it or sell it. 

First, what is a Locost?  Here is a quick rundown from wikipedia:

"A Locost is a home-built clone of the Lotus Seven. The car features a space frame chassis usually welded together from mild steel 1 × 1 in (25 × 25 mm) square tubing. Front suspension is usually double wishbone with coil overs. The rear is traditionally live axle, but has many variants including independent rear suspension or De Dion tube. Body panels are usually fiberglass nose and wings and aluminium side panels. Each car is highly individualized according to the resources, needs and desires of each respective builder."

 And a beautiful example made by someone else:

I plan on building a Locost using the McSorely 442E plans utilizing 1.25" mild steel square tubing.  The different tubing size requires a little bit of "freeplay" with the plans, so this should prove interesting.  I've also decided to make use of an IRS in car as well, utilizing the Rorty IRS plans (or a derivative).

I'll try to update this thing once a week with progress, pictures, and lessons learned.  Stay tuned. If you want any specific pictures, more details, let me know!