We build a Go Kart out of scrap 2x4 | Chassis, suspension & steering

so uncle ethan brought over some two by four and each of these pieces of two by four is about is about three feet long and some of these and he basically brought it over because what did he buy you jensen he bought you a toolkit a tool kit yeah where is it um over here and these are planets yes okay so uncle ethan bought jensen a toolkit and he brought all this wood around and said build something out of this wood you know it's an important rite of passage and it's an important father-son bonding experience to build a [Music] go-kart and i've worked all this into a design in google sketchup which is a brilliant product and uh you can do all the kind of fun zooming in and you know kind of measuring and testing and everything now the design is based around the wheels we found now we found these tractor wheels on craigslist okay so i'm excited about the wheels i think they're going to work really well um so some of the technical challenges with building out a 2x4 are that it's going to be very heavy um and there's going to be structural challenges to building it and one of the structural challenges is things like this this is the only thing we've built so far we need a shaft to go through here the front wheel is going to go on and there's going to be quite a bit of twisting force on this so um we're going to put bearings on there these bolts are epoxied inside of here and it's all glued and screwed together but jensen what are we going to attempt as our first uh big task now that we've now that we've done the steering pieces i don't know what do we just spend the last half an hour like sketching up on this piece of paper um numbers yeah numbers the num each number represents a piece of wood that we're going to cut it looks pretty good i think it could i think it should be finished yes it's going to take a little while though isn't it yeah [Music] okay so uh we have our plans and we have our wood i'm just making all of the holes uh through it so we can pass our metal shafts our rods through so that we can get some good structural integrity unfortunately uncle jordan has one of these bench presses which is proving very very useful and papa's helping thank you papa and this is it laid out for the first time on the garage floor uh and it's surprisingly big actually now that i see it in real life thank you honey oh beautiful hat so these two rods here that we've drilled holes for are for structural integrity those are threaded rods uh so that we can kind of just scr you know tighten everything up make sure it's really nice and uh secure because given that the we only had these lengths these shorter lengths we really couldn't do like a whole front to back um that was one of the constraints that we are working with but actually i think it's led to quite a good look because we've got kind of got these side pods here um it should be pretty sturdy in here so that's all going to be bolted together then we have this rod going through the back here uh which is uh going to be there partly for structural rigidity but actually this one isn't threaded this one is there mostly to support these trailing arms now you see on the picture we only have like one but in reality uh those need to be doubled up because um one i mean given the weight and the size of this thing one is just there's just way too much potential for flex here from right to left what do you think pretty good now where do you think you sit in the middle yeah that's right right there and then you're right the spoiler is going to come back yeah yeah from there it's going to go like that yeah [Applause] huh [Music] actual structural integrity is very good i'm extremely pleased with how rigid this thing is now the trailing arms are in now one slight design change that i made is i was planning to have this rod go all the way through but the spacers the steel spacers that i've used the rod goes through have very very low tolerance and getting it just wound all the way through was proving to be too difficult and honestly by putting this in instead which is screwed in and it's it's actually offering more structural integrity than the rod would have so i'm very happy with this kind of just cut down mechanism and the trailing arms uh one of the things i was concerned about actually is the trailing arms would have too much left right play there'll be too much stress on this but actually it turns out i mean it's just great i can move it left and right from the end and there's just there's no play in it at all so once i've put something across here and i'm thinking maybe plywood because plywood will give me some nice sheer strength to link these two together um but once we've got those linked together we can put bearings on i think they're going to go on top they might go underneath but i think they're going to go on top and then get the axle in and get the rear wheels on and then we can start to play with it now one other consideration is the suspension now this has arrived and what we plan to do is to mount this into position mount this something like that as you can see i've been working on the suspension of the go-kart and when i built a cage around the inner tube uh which is quite effective and it means that i can get a reasonable amount of springing which is good it's what i want um however it has led me to consider a design change and let me show you what i what i think i should do here now the way it's designed right now is that pressure coming up needs to be met with an opposing force coming down and the way that it's levered or levered right now is that a large amount of movement here equates to a small amount of movement here and this tube needs to be inflated pretty high to provide enough opposing force to spring the go-kart adequately i think and my concern is that if i add a lot of air to this and and pump up the pressure my concern is that i'm just going to get a puncture i would much rather run a lower pressure with higher leverage than a high pressure with low leverage so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to add this which is going to be just a simple bolt-on change and what that will do is it will translate this upward movement into sideways movement with a bit of leverage and i'll be pressuring uh the tube that way rather than pressuring the tube that way and hopefully that will give me a high spring rate for low air pressure that's what we're going for all right i've made the modification let's see at the back there i've put some duct tape around the sharp edges and it's much improved let me show you i can actually stand on it now and i can jump on it and i get a really nice amount of springing so i think that's going to be absolutely perfect and that's the exact same air pressure as i had before so now the chassis is pretty much straight with the suspension in i can get the rear bearings on and get the wheels on and then we're left with the steering [Music] um so we're testing the height of the steering wheel aren't we jensen yeah and we're testing if it goes good we'll even put a piece here we've put a piece there and uh we now need to fix it up to these i know what to do i'm joints i've finished the steering now uh i'm delighted with how it's come out i debated all sorts of different approaches to doing this and this one actually turned out to be remarkably simple these plates here are great because you can bend them slightly to get just the right angle and it's working great it's stirring really nicely from this uh steering wheel here um but the screw is allowing for a little bit too much play i need to put like a pin in there or something or a bolt something that's actually going to give a little bit less play but uh it's working great so jensen has not seen it yet i think it's great can you can you turn the steering wheel okay so what i'm going to do jensen is put a plank of wood on there you can sit on and i'm gonna give you a little push okay down the hill yeah down the hill can you steer jensen stay well [Music] you

Channel: Ben Corrie

Views: 161,640

Keywords: go kart, kart, DIY kart

Id: 3v3IOyaEL0I

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021