Journey to the Baja 1000 - Episode 4 - Steering on the Cheap

welcome back to the journey to the Baja 1000 where today we're getting started on the fabrication of the steering for the J 10 race truck [Music] you're watching the journey to the Baja 1000 [Music] first let's go into a little bit of explanation on what we're doing and why we're doing things let's compare this vehicle maybe to the vehicle you have that in your garage if you have something out there that has an independent front suspension which this one will have and you look underneath what you'll find is that your engine is far forward in the engine bay and it occupies a lot of the space where the suspension you want to have a longer suspension and the reason is is it's safer for the pasture compartment you have radiators up there you might have your air conditioning all kinds of other plumbing up in the front of the engine which limits the size of your upper arms for that suspension when you start building a truck where suspension travel is the most important part like in a trophy truck or maybe a prerunner now we'll see how I go this vehicle as I push the engine further back into the firewall and that's frees up this space that's in front of the engine now I can at least put another foot of length on that upper suspension arm and that translates into more suspension travel on the front of the vehicle and that's what I'm doing here the complications that arise when you're doing that is now the steering system that you have whether you have a rack and pinion or you're using a steering box or something like that that becomes complicated is now where do you put those things such as they don't interfere with that traveling suspension arm and that's what we're going to try to do today we're gonna start working on the steering of this vehicle and this see if we can make it fit so when we're talking about steering for a truck build like this the trophy trucks and those guys they're spending you know three four five thousand dollars just for their steering boxes and like I said I'm making a budget race truck here so one thing that I found in all the builds I've ever done is I've never seen a steering box fail they're just pretty much bulletproof they're they're heavy so I'm probably going to give up a little bit as far as weight I do need to do some designing around making this thing work but my plan is for $0 to take this steering box that came out of the 2010 chevy silverado 2500 HD and I'm gonna see if I can make it work with a suspension that I'm making let's go ahead and take a look at the fabrication to get this box to fit inside this j-10 alright here are my workbench is a quick look at what the steering setup is going to look like basically so you see that the old steering box out of the 2010 chevy silverado is in a bracket that looks something like what it'll look like when it's finally in the j10 they'll be mounted and connected to this steering slider I'm calling it this is a piece of two inch quarter wall square 2 which is sleeved over a one and a half inch by 3/16 wall square tube and basically that slides nice and smooth back and forth the pitman arm is represented by the welding wire which is skinny six inches long it'll be connected to this 3/4 inch rod end and then it'll go ahead and slide back and forth forcing this slider back and forth and the slider will be connected to the spindles with other rod ends all right so this is a pretty big deal I had the steering box in the location that I'm probably gonna mounted maybe look up towards the front of the car in other interest so that's pretty close I just wanted to confirm before I went any further with this bill that I could actually get a steering shaft all the way up to the to the steering wheel without too extreme of bends on those u-joints I can get a steering chef maneet there and what I will probably do is that this u-joint right here I'll probably extend that shaft probably an inch or two just to give myself a little more clearance away from the exhaust manifold and also a little bit more clearance I need that power steering pump but all in all I think it's good to go I'm going to continue with this with this plan there's some simple math from an online triangle calculator the you know balls with getting about thirty four degrees of deflection in each each direction my steering arm is gonna be six inches and so is it the turned it'll still be six inches so the distance that the rod and has got to push the steering arm to go to the full lock of the you know ball is about three and a half inches it's actually slightly less because really what's happening is their rod is pushing this direction so it's slightly less than 3.5 we'll just go ahead and calculate it for three point five next I'm using this dial that I have drawing the piece of paper to make sure that I get to the full deflection of the will before I get to the lock of the steering box and as you can see the lines represented here at the extremes are three and a half inches in either direction so as I turn the will there's a half turn there's one full turn and then before I get to one and a half turns I hit that three and a half inches and that will be the stop of the bearing and where I will also put the mechanical stops on the other string and it will go beyond that but what it does give me as you can see is I will have something less maybe 2 and 3/4 turn locked a lock for the steering system which i think is gonna be pretty good so now I'm done making that part with the wood mocking it up I'm ready to put this into a steel plate so I'm starting with fusion 360 so here you go I know where the holes are gonna go I know how high I want those holes that be above that where the base of the plate mounts what I'm doing here is up the center I'm gonna reinforce this spine with a two inch by two inch square tube and since I'm going to drill about a inch and a half square tube in the round tube in the mill that square tube to get a socket through there to put that bolt in I'm extending a little bit higher to give that square tube a little bit more rigidity since there's me a lot of forces going on in this part and then just other themes while I'm making this part is I try to round off every single corner to eliminate any stress concentrations on the part that I'm making so let's go ahead and take this thing put it on the plasma table and start cutting it out making our first real part for the truck [Music] this plasma table is just so awesome but there's definitely like anything you buy like this there is a learning curve and you as you can see as I cut that first hole I'm cutting quarter-inch plate at 25 inches per minute now there's a setting inside the fusion 360 lawyers to accept which tells you well after you cut apart how fast you want it to jog to the next part and I left it at 25 inches per minute so you can see as moving as slowly as if it was cutting to the next part in later parts that I cut I'll dial it up to 300 inches per minute and now it cuts a hole and then it zips the next part in the cut it goes a lot faster and the software is really smart too as its cutting you can see that it will move around the part so just in case the part you just cut tips up it'll actually move such that the the torch won't come in contact with that part that zipped up here is the template that I used originally to mock up the steering box and here's the one I just made on the plasma table is pretty Gillis y'all fits well this is the first part that I made with the plasma table and I am totally blown away with how accurate it's making the aparts with the exact dimensions that I had put in there these bolts I did have to reduce them out a little bit with a grinder but they basically dropped right in well now I'm just knocking out the top of this tube that knees on the spine there and the tool that I'm using right now is called the beast by JD squared and I'm going to put a link for it in my description just like everything JD's square makes it is awesome just the part probably weighs about 50 pounds I literally use it as an anvil I will bang on this thing just about fold any piece of metal in there whether it in two notches or just do any kind of cutting this thing the holders in there it's a really cool so I'll uncute notching I'm use wd-40 to keep the blade cool I can't say it's the best thing to use you can see that it's hidden La Plata smoke I do my best to divert that out the door or out of window or blow it away from so I'm not breathing in the smoke directly but does get pretty bad if you do this also in the spirit of we're helping each other built things out there if you have mind putting that down in the comments that you use and you know maybe we can learn from each other so I got to put a couple holes through this spine and I've used every kind of drill bit step bits and everything and they do a great job but just never underestimate the power of a good drill for this is an old craftsman I probably add it more than 20 years but just the ability to put big bits to thick pieces of metal quickly nothing well here's the final part I'm really pleased with the way it went together I feel like that CNC plasma table can really take fabrication to the next level I will try in the future to take my video skills to the next level and make sure I get better camera angles and those kinds of things so you get a better view what I'm doing well I promise you in the future that the videos are gonna start getting better as I work on camera angles and all that stuff I've never done before I guarantee you that the contents gonna get a lot better the next episode is going to finish up this steering you kind of get a sneak peak if you look back over here I got the whole steering system the front end mocked up on the well table I'm gonna get to fabrication later on this evening really some cool stuffs gonna start happening on these two coming videos okay it's a budget truck let's talk about the budget so for this project I really probably used maybe two or three dollars worth of Steel but I'm just gonna go ahead and lump the whole mess in there so I'm not just piecemealing it throughout the other project on my rack right now what I have is a whole rack full of inch and a half do em two inch by 120 wall do em I've got a sheet of quarter plate a sheet of 3/16 plate and 11 gauge plate still and I've got a whole bunch of other smaller parts which I've had for other projects I'm not gonna lump that into the cost that's just freebies for this build so right now the total cost of the steel is nine hundred and forty eight dollars that brings the total cost of the bill to this point to two thousand nine hundred and six dollars and forty nine cents I know you're like wow he's never gonna get to twenty thousand dollars trust me when we start talking about shocks we're gonna get $20,000 real quick well I want to say thanks so much for those of you who have liked and subscribed to my videos but I keep hearing from some of my friends that they just never know when the next video comes up let's figure out how to fix that while you're watching the videos there's a couple options underneath here you got the like button you can push if you'd want you can hit subscribe to subscribe to my channel importantly there's a little bell over here if you click on the Bell and then click the option that says all anytime I have a new video comes out it'll give you a notification likewise just on your smartphone you saw have to like subscribe in the Bell right there and by doing this you won't miss the next episode of the journey to the Baja 1000 right we're here with Ryan one of the drivers from NTD racing and we're getting my first haircut in about four months fast like a haircut be good brother do it well thanks again for joining us on this episode please don't forget to hit the like and subscribe buttons below we'll see you in the next episode take care of yourself [Music] [Music]

Channel: NTD Racing

Views: 2,053

Keywords: baja 1000, ensenada mexico, ntd racing, trophy truck, building, fabricating, diy, Jeep, Jeep J10, CJ7, CJ, King Shocks, FK Bearings, LS Swap, LS Engine, Driveway Engineer, Welding, score, off road racing, desert racing, bendpak, miller, langmuir systems, plasma table, plasma, plasma cnc, 3d printer, creality, ender 3, driveway engineer

Id: uGDL-2ZpTBg

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020