Journey to the Baja 1000 - Episode 9 - Building the Upper A-Arms

today's episode of the journey to the baja 1000 is the big payoff where we finally put all the parts together for the front of the j-10 race truck you're watching the journey to the baja [Music] 1000 okay let's take a look at the upper suspension arm design and how i'm going about doing that first i just got everything indexed to where this thing is parallel with the uh the ground i've also got the spindle mounted up on this really simple jig to make sure that it is at the full bump at the very top and then also mounted such that it's vertical basically how the suspension is going to mount up as you see is there's uh this tube right here this will be where the inside where the chassis side of the suspension will mount with two three quarter inch rod ends and then the plate will go out to the upper um part of the spindle and can now connect to a one inch uniball up at the the top now that one of the most important considerations here that i needed to do with my design is i need to make sure that that upper suspension arm clears which will basically be the tube that eventually connects this thing to the rest of the the chassis and also the the shocks it needs to clear that and the distance i've got here between these two is about seven inches i'll give myself six inches and then i'll make sure that as this thing comes out and before it makes the turn in basically for the rest of the suspension that it clears the the whole steering system other considerations while i'm making this especially while i was making this lower suspension arm is i needed to make sure that as that tire which is going to be the full you know 37 inches or i guess 18 and a half inches swings this way from the 37 inch tire that it doesn't come over here and strike the lower suspension arm and that's a consideration on the lower suspension arm on the upper suspension arm let me show you why it isn't as much of a consideration so here here we are looking at the spindle connected to that uh that tire and you can see you know that tire swings this whole part of the tire is going to swing and move and potentially hit the lower suspension arm but as we look at that upper suspension arm there's just really no way for that tire to swing around and come in contact almost any geometry of that upper suspension arm i make won't contact it now i realize i'm gonna have a the uniball sitting here and then it's gonna space off a little bit before making that turn for the uh to connect to the chassis side of the upper suspension so it's just just not as much of a concern obviously it's always something i think about but it's not as much of a concern i can make more dramatic turns and not have to think as much about the tire striking the upper suspension arm okay well let's start with how do i get the thoughts out of my brain i'm one of those guys first off that i go to sleep thinking about designs thinking about stuff i'm working on in the garage and then how do i get that stuff on the paper sometimes i will write it on paper especially if i'm at work or something like that i'll kind of sketch out the design one of the things i use a lot in the uh the garage is i have a couple of just large cheap grease boards uh with some grease pens that i use uh and what i do is i just kind of start sketching out designs i do a lot of math in here i often go to the internet to figure out how to calculate you know all that such stuff you know how to calculate for triangles and those kinds of things and then once i have all the numbers and like that all that on the board i will take the board over to my computer and i'll start translating those into the things that i can use in fusion 360 there's a lot of programs out there it just so happens that fusion 360 is a free program right now for certain criteria so that's the one that i like to use let me show you how i do that so let me take a couple minutes here to show you what i use in fusion 360 such that i can make parts and if you want to make the kind of parts that i'm making like suspension parts then you can use this let me give you one disclaimer i my primary job is usually i'm a pilot and i don't do this stuff all the time uh and so there might be other techniques that do this better than i'm doing this is the way i figured out how to do it and it's working for me so i took all the dimensions that i had whether it was on the grease board or just took it straight off the uh the truck and you have to put those in the fusion 360 and i draw those up as just construction lines and you'll figure out what that is when you start using fusion 360. right over here is where the uniball is going to go this is where i'm going to weld on to the uh the the bungs that i use the square bungs for the other rod ends and then you kind of got an area here i gotta clear to make sure that i i don't hit the um the perimeter that holds my steering rack and i start with that and then from there i just start building pieces around i basically connect the dots and i'm just going to start zooming forward so if you hear my mouse clicking that's what i'm doing i start building pieces and putting them in there now this is one of those cases where you there might be a better way to do it and i just don't know how to do it and so this is how i put these things together i'm going to zoom in here in a second on some of these parts so you can see that as i zoom in these are all individual squares that i made and a lot of times i will use the the three-point square option but when i make these squares there's no there's a gap in there i don't let them touch now that's obviously like a you know darn near at the hair level there's a gap in there these things aren't actually touching each other so i'll zoom in while making those squares i can always weld and fill those those voids in but what happens is if i if they're touching each other when i extrude those parts and make them into an elongated part they become one body and i need these things to be as separate bodies for when i lay them out in fusion 360 so i can i can cut them or you know put them in a flat plane i just there might be a better way to do it i just don't know what it is um so this is what i do to to make it so these are individual bodies and i'll show you why that's important here in a second so i go through and i continue uh building and so once i've got the the basic shape in the vertical these are four inches tall is what i made each of these plates now what i kind of do is i will go in the side over here and you can see where now i'm putting in the the extrusion there i basically said just cut a two and a half inch circle there and that's where the cup for the uniball is going to go and then i'll just go around and i'll just continue cutting out the parts i don't want for example there i'm cutting at the top the uh the for the where i'm gonna weld the bungs on and then now i slice it to be the right height that i want and once that's done i'm gonna go ahead and make the skin for the top just by basically tracing it and extruding a solid piece of the top again it is a separate uh body on there and then i'll put about the bottom on and now you pretty much have what is the the full profile the full piece that i want to to cut out so now i've got to start taking this thing apart so again as i zoom forward since they're separate bodies all i have to do is hit the m key which gives me the move prompt and now i can slide things out of the way and and expose the individual parts now i'm going to i'm going to move them all around here in a second but i want to show you this is like the one thing i'm like how do you do this i it took me forever to figure this out and it probably shouldn't have it's pretty easy you want to make sure you have origin turned on over here on the bars just so you know which plane you want to put the parts on and then when you want to make a part and lay it flat so that you can put it in the manufacturing function of this software so that you can cut it then what you're going to do is you're going to go over here to modify and you're going to say align and now what you do is you say i want to put this face right here the face of this thing i want to lay it down flat and if you want to lay on the other side you just flip it around to the other side so i click on that and now i want to align it with let me see make sure i get it right i want to line it with front align it with that face and boom now it flips that thing over and lays it flat in plain and now when i start moving those things around they're all in the same plane which will make it easy for me to just now it's easy to set up follow the tutorials that landmark systems has or fusion for 360 to set it up to use in a plasma table let me go back and put that thing back where it was uh and then i'll go ahead and continue zooming forward so i continue laying these things out and then the other thing i do is as you can see is this piece right here is i want it to be one continuous piece just like i talked about when i was making the lower suspension if i can make one continuous piece and avoid having welds i will do that so so what i'm going to do is i'm going to lay that piece out and i need you to make sure that you keep it in relation you let you know okay these are the bottom so these are all the flat sides those got to line up they align that piece up in that piece up so you don't want to get them lost as you start moving around your screen so i'll try to move those pieces which i'm going to weld our you know join together all as one let me see if i can fast forward and show you what i do with that so if as you can see with this one down here i'm starting to take these two pieces let me go back one so i took the piece off i laid it flat now i just rotated it lined up and i again i use that line function i said line those two ends up and now i'm gonna line these edges up with the align function and now that's those pieces are right next to each other what i will generally do from here is i will set up a gap in between the two pieces of about almost the thickness of the metal because that's where i'm gonna bend it i usually go about half the thickness of the metal um and then you can see there's a joint right there and what i will do to i put little notches in there so i know where to put it in my uh my tube notcher and then what i will do is you can kind of see a little piece just filled in right there and if you saw that what i did there is i just basically made a square over that i just drew on the surfaces made a square and i extruded it and when i did the extrusion i said join and that it makes it into one piece like basically glues the pieces together and now this becomes one piece and i can move that around my screen as one piece and i do that all the time for all those pieces that are that i'm using now as i'm getting all these things laid out okay i'm getting them just basically arranged what i'm going to do eventually here i'm now obviously joining some pieces there you see me putting those together sliding together making the joints is now i'm going to try and lay those out into something i can actually cut on the fusion 360. so what i'll do is you'll see i'll make a square here which is basically a 48 inch wide by there it is 48 by maybe 21 inches i can't remember what it was i i use but this is my cut what i basically say this is what i'm cutting on on when i go and put it into the plasma table so now i'm just going to again select m and then move those parts move those bodies into place now if those bodies were all connected together you couldn't do this and that's why i had to have them separated apart if somebody knows how to do that better how you how to make bodies uh and separate them once they're you know after they're joined on accident or something like that please post it in the comments or something like that let me know i really need to know so there you go i put it all together and once it's there now it's ready to go put in the plasma table and start cutting let's go check that out okay so first off i'm not a an affiliate with a lane meyer systems i get nothing for uh talking about their their tools so but i just love it that's why i like to prop them up all the time i think they're a great a great company and they just put out an amazing product i love using the plasma table i've already have two videos out if you go back and look at my tool tips there's a part one and a part two where i put it together and put use in my shop and i'm about to have a part three here pretty soon where i am going to make the trailing arms for the j-10 race truck those are going to be 60 inches long and i got i can only feed 33 inches at a time so i have to make a cut shift and then continue the cut i'll just give you a whole video on how i do that in case you want to make longer parts with your langmar systems crossfire pro building the upper suspension arms was really just a lot like building the lower suspension arms just maybe in a slightly smaller scale just you know grinding away the metal preparing it with some acetone bending the parts tacking them up and all that so if you really want to i'm going to go through it kind of quickly here and spend a little bit less time so if you want to watch a little bit more about in detail how i put those parts together on the lower suspension arms which was pretty much the same you can go ahead back and check out episode 7 which i think is pretty good and goes a little bit more in depth on that but to keep this video from going too long i'll zip through these uh some of these bins [Music] and well i really feel like i was welding on these suspension arms for days and it probably was because i really was i ended up making one of the suspension arms i when i mounted the cup for the uniball i just missed it i missed the dimension by about five degrees and it totally messed up the way the upper upper suspension would allow the uh the spindle to rotate and limited the steering it was down to like 20 degrees it had been crazy so i ended up just trashing it ended up being about a hundred dollars in parts when you had the two bungs and that race and all the steel and everything and just lost time but i did end up making the uh another additional upper suspension i think it came together a lot better i had a before i could get it all together i had to cut out some uh some tabs uh to make it and as always i love the landmark systems uh crossfire pro because i was just thinking man i need some tabs to mount this thing i didn't have to go to a store or anything about two minutes on fusion 360. drop it into the the plasma table and boom a couple minutes later i've got eight tabs and they came out just about perfect a little bit of die grinder to make those holes perfect and then i just wanted to get the thing together and give you a sneak peek of what it looks like with the tire on look it's looking awesome so i'm getting pretty close to the point where i can put everything together and get to see the steering system suspension and work as a system there's a couple clean up things that i still have to do mainly with the spindles as you can see i already put the brackets on where the tie rods will connect to the steering and basically this the the steering work on the uh the spindles one last thing i need to do is i need to box this thing in and kind of deciding where i was going to box it in was a little tricky i don't think i'll box in below the lower uh uniball i just think that there's enough rigidity in in there and the boxing at the top will help uh on the bottom i don't think i'll box in the top of the where the steering tie rod mounts but this whole part up here which is kind of hanging off in space uh i will so i did cut out really quickly cranked out on the plasma table a couple of plates i'm using eighth inch or 11 gauge steel for these plates this would be one for the bottom i need to bend that one up to make it a fit and this will have three bins in it to make it fit on the top nice and clean ready to weld if you're interested in how i did that you can go back and look i think it was episode seven where we completed the spindles or part two of the lane meyer systems crossfire pro uh plasma table where i talk about how to get the mill scale off of the metal like this you can check it out well if you can't tell i get a ton of use out of this press break by swag offroad i provided a link in the last episode i'll provide one in this one also i think it's a great tool anytime that you can get rid of a weld and replace it with a bent piece of metal you just get rid of all those issues you have with the with heat affected zones and those kinds of things and you can see it just makes i think a really sweet part and i and i'm gonna as i continue making stuff i'm gonna continue trying to make stuff with bends as opposed to wells because i think it looks pretty uh pretty awesome just quick a little take a little measurement a ben and boom there's another part and didn't take much very long to make that happen in this last part my last narration here is uh i've had friends always ask me about hey what's the difference between mig welding and tig welding well this is tig welding tungsten inner gas or hilly arc welding and you know when you're done with it's just fun to do it isn't loud when you're done with it you want to show somebody your weld it's just a really high quality weld and it's just kind of fun to do and then there's mig welding and mig welding is just another beast and i maybe i don't like it very much because i'm just not that good at it you know and it just makes splatter all over the place it destroys your parts i think i got lucky i didn't ruin that race that's uh on the spindle there but it's just a mess you know once it's done you just hope you can hide it behind something without having to show anybody i know there are guys out there they're just amazing mig welders i'm just not one of them well it is finally all together here here's pretty much the finished product there's a couple pieces left i basically got a hook you know weld in some tubing on the front just to brace this thing up but now all the moving parts are together and i'll show you in a second i'll put set the camera down so you can see me moving things but uh wow it's all gone together and it's all working without any binding i'm uh i'm super happy with the way that the whole front end has gone together uh just for uh reference the engine is gonna sit you know basically right inside here and then also this is where we're gonna have those uh bypass shocks the coilovers and the bump stops are gonna land right there on those massive lower uh suspension arms you got the whole steering system this is just the stock steering system out of the 2010 chevy silverado 2500 hd modded i don't know if anyone else has done anything like this uh i think it actually when they're pretty pretty awesome i think it's really trick uh hopefully uh some guys will kind of like what i did for my favorite price i always tell my little boy it's absolutely free this is pretty uh pretty cool just using some old recycled parts there i can't wait to put some hydraulic power on that still gotta get this shuttle um it fits in there it slides nicely what i got to do is i gotta put those rubber boots uh on there and also just basically grease the jesus out of this shuttle so it doesn't get any dirt in there and it slides really nice i am gonna be welding in just a little bit of a stop right here i'll bolt here so i can have mechanical stops for the the steering just some little tiny things that i have left i got to do but besides that it's all done let me set the camera down for a second and just show you how everything runs okay a little bit about the design that i chose to go with on this i went with what i would call a parallel box suspension you have a couple different kinds you can go with a shorter you know short long arm type suspension there's all kinds of calculators for that you can you could probably go with something called a mcpherson strut uh what i went with is it's just a parallel box so everything happens to be 24 inches so the distance for the upper suspension arm the lower suspension arm and the tie rod all equals 24 inches such that as the suspension goes through its travel it all means maintains parallel and what that gives you is no bumps here uh throughout the travel of the suspension what it does give you is a lot of tire scrubbing that's usually taken out by a short long arm suspension i decided to go with tire scrub just for a more simple design and also uh just to get rid of any kind of a bumpsteer the way it's set up right now it's actually about you know about six inches above its neutral position so once it's on the truck it'll actually be about six inches lower and i probably have about 12 inches of vertical and you know about 20 inches if i wanted to go down and down direction i'm shooting for about 20 inches of total travel in the suspension once it's on the truck and then one last thing i just wanted to show you is as i turn the the steering shaft over here as you just kind of now get to see the whole thing working as it moves the shuttle across and steers both sides i have done all the math i've calculated for ackermann angle uh and right now just the whole thing works exactly how i wanted to i couldn't be more pleased i can't wait to get this thing welded on but first i've got to go ahead and start making that roll cage uh and then i'll weld this thing on after that's done well that's about it for this video i just got done asking my phone it says i have 86 days until november 17th when we're planning on trying to drive this thing down to ensenada uh so there is a lot to get done the pressure's on a lot of drama here to get this uh this car ready for the baja 1000 uh with this done i'm feeling pretty good i got to get on the roll cage to see if any kind of hiccups happen along the way for that design i'm hoping that goes a little bit more smoothly and quickly definitely with a lot less welding anyway i'm gonna wrap this video up thank you so much for joining me on this edition of the journey to the baja 1000 i hope to see you again on the next videos take care of yourself [Music] [Music] you

Channel: NTD Racing

Views: 4,595

Keywords: fusion 360, cad, truck parts, cnc plasma cutter

Id: 95ndC-HQ3Nw

Length: 22min 6sec (1326 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2020