enough suspense

It's late December, the weather is getting colder, the year is drawing to an end.  It's a time to look back in review, and to look ahead in anticipation.  At the end of last year, I'd just finished assembling the engine, and mounted it on the chassis (for the first time, at least), and had also started assembling the front suspension.  It's a year later now, and it feels in many ways like very little has gotten done, but actually I suppose there has been some significant progress.  In fact, in October it was looking like the Chicago Cubs had ceased to be "the Chicago Cubs" and had instead become an actual baseball team comprised of baseball players, which just happened to be called "the Chicago Cubs."  What does that have to do with Matilda?  Well, when they knocked the St. Louis Cardinals (who looked almost as if they had ceased to be "the St. Louis Cardinals" and had instead become merely a baseball team comprised of baseball players) out of the playoffs in five games, it appeared that the Cubs were on a trajectory that would end with an inevitable World Series Championship.  And considering that the Cubs had not won a World Series since 1908, it seemed like it would be very embarrassing if they were able to win one before I could get my chassis back to the body shop.  I decided, then, in October, that even though there was one more thing that I could do before sending the chassis back to the body shop, I would do better to just call it "close enough" and get on with it.  So, I called up the body shop and told the owner that I was ready to bring him a chassis.  He told me he didn't have a place to put the chassis at the moment and suggested that I wait until he had some floor space clear out in his shop.  So, I decided I would have to settle for just having the chassis ready to go back to the body shop before the Cubs won the World Series.  But the point is, the chassis is ready now.  And, as a footnote, the Cubs were (much to my shock and amazement) swept out of the NLCS by the New York Mets, so I very much hope at this point that the chassis will still make it back to the body shop before the Cubs win a World Series.

Anyway, as I'd mentioned in the post about the oil pan mod, I had started assembling the front suspension a while ago.  I had thought that when I had the engine and transmission on the frame it would be enough weight to allow me to compress the front suspension springs, but it turned out it wasn't.  I guess I hadn't thought as far as the rear suspension springs, but of course there wasn't enough weight back there, either.  I'd like to be able to claim that I thought of the solution myself, but in fact my first attempt at a solution only made things worse.  I tried using a couple ratchet straps to help compress the springs in combination with the jack.  This did allow me to compress the spring, but trying to release the ratchet straps once they have that massive spring compressed is difficult to control at best, and dangerous at worst.  In fact, when I first did the front passenger side, I hadn't thought it through properly and when I released the ratchet strap the upper control arm slammed down onto its bump stop.  At the time I thought I smelled something like an electrical fire, but that didn't make any sense, and the smell went away in a minute, so I didn't think anything more of it.  Well, a couple days later I found a chunk of rubber on the floor and realized that the smell had been the smell of the rubber bump stop exploding from the impact with the frame.  So, that meant I would need to disassemble that side again to replace the bump stop.  I decided I needed a better plan.

YouTube to the rescue!  I found a video (can't find it now, unfortunately, or I'd link it) where a guy showed how to use ratchet straps to solve the problem, but he was running them over the frame and under the jack, instead of just strapping the two control arms together like I'd tried to do.  This allows you to use the jack to control how you release the spring compression.  I criss-crossed two ratchet straps over the frame, and crossed them again under the jack:

This allows you to use the jack to release the load safely and properly.  Be careful to make sure you don't pinch anything under the ratchet strap, though, such as the brake line that I ran the ratchet strap under while doing the rear suspension:

So, that is basically how the suspension went together, but it all came apart and went back together a couple times.  The rear had to come apart when I found the front seal leaking on the rear end, as described in my last post, and the front had to come apart when I went to grease the ball joints and found that two of the dust boots were torn on the ball joints.  I had probably fouled those up during one of the disassemblies/reassemblies.  Nobody seems to sell stock rubber boots loose, they just come with new ball joints, so I ended up ordering some polyurethane boots through Summit.

Anyway, you can see that the suspension is together, and the hubs are sporting some shiny new disc brake hardware.  I got a disc brake conversion kit from CPP.  Front and rear sway bars are from Hotchkis.  Control arms and springs are from Global West.  I try to get everything I can from the same supplier, in hopes that they've done some engineering to make it all work together.  But Global West didn't offer a rear sway bar, so I got the sway bars from Hotchkis.

One thing that was frustrating about the rear suspension, and another good reason to try to get everything from one source, was that there was an interference between the Global West mounting brackets for the upper rear control arms, and the mounting hardware for the Hotchkis rear sway bar.  The Global West brackets each offer two mounting holes, one in the stock location and a lower one.  The lower hole is intended to provide "anti-squat" geometry.  This was something I didn't know about until I got the Global West hardware, but it's kind of interesting.  As a car accelerates, the weight of the body shifts towards the rear of the car and the back end of the car "squats" on the rear suspension.  This affects balance and weight distribution.  Anti-squat geometry counteracts this effect by altering the angle of the rear upper control arm.

The diagram below represents a side view of a wheel (in black) on a car being accelerated towards the left side of the drawing.  The black arrow shows the direction the tire is being rotated.  The blue lines represent a sideview cross section of the rearend housing.  The reaction force of the rotation on the rear wheel attempts to turn the rearend housing in the opposite direction (blue arrow).  The blue horizontal rectangle at the top of the diagram represents a sideview of the rear upper control arm.  The rear upper control arm stops the rearend housing from rotating in the direction of the blue arrow, which puts the upper control arm in tension (orange arrow).  There is also a lower control arm, which runs parallel to the upper control arm and attaches to the bottom of the rearend housing, but I left it off of this diagram because it was already too cluttered.

So the bottom line is, when the car accelerates, the rear upper control arm is in tension.  Anti-squat geometry moves the forward mounting point of that rear upper control arm down, so that the arm is at an angle to the ground, as shown below.  Now it is still in tension, but because it is at an angle, that tensile force now has a horizontal component, and a vertical component (shown with orange arrows below), whereas it previously only had a horizontal component.  So the horizontal component stops the rearend housing from rotating, just like in the old arrangement, but the vertical component now pulls up on the point where it is mounted to the frame, essentially pulling the back end of the car up by its bootstraps, fighting the normal reaction to "squat."  Kind of neat.

Well, the problem was that the mounting hardware for the Hotchkis sway bar was designed to clear the stock upper rear control arm, as it is mounted in the stock position, but it is not designed to clear the Global West upper rear control arm as it is mounted in the Global West anti-squat position.  This was frustrating to me, because I wanted this anti-squat deal to work, so I spent a whole bunch of time trying to figure out how to make it all go together.

To make a long story short, in the end I decided to mount the rear upper control arms in their stock geometry, and give up the anti-squat feature.  The more I studied up on anti-squat, the less it sounded like something I needed.  It sounds like the most interesting application of it is in circle track cars with three-link rear suspension.  The three link suspension has two rear lower control arms, but only one rear upper control arm.  That arm can be shifted off center so that the anti-squat effect also provides an anti-roll effect.  For that to work, you'd have to be racing on an oval so that you always know you're going to be turning the same direction.  I have a parallel four-link rear suspension with a panhard bar, and I don't plan to always turn the same direction, so I decided that I would live without anti-squat.  For now, at least.  If I decide in the future that I really need it, all the hardware is there and I can always try to make it work some other way.

So, the suspension is mounted.

Needs wheels.  I ordered some plain steel rims from Summit, and tires.  I looked at Firestone, which supplied tires to NASCAR teams in the '60s, and I looked at Goodyear, which supplies tires to NASCAR teams now, but neither one of them had a tire in the size I was looking for.  As it turned out, though, Hoosier had just started offering street tires less than a year before I started looking for tires.  They had the size I wanted, and they're super cool.  Hoosier's always been just a race tire manufacturer, mostly to "grassroots" level racers.  They tried to crack into big time NASCAR for a year or two in the '90s, but Goodyear ended up beating them out.  Anyway, I ordered some Hoosiers.

I wanted to get the rims powdercoated, and I needed to get the tires mounted and balanced.  I didn't have a pickup truck yet at that point, but I did have a Corvair with no back seat...

Turns out you can fit five steel rims and five tires (planning for a spare in the trunk) in the back of a 1966 Corvair with no back seat.

There were a couple hang ups with getting the tires mounted and balanced, but in the end I got them back, and I used a Dupli-Color tire paint pen to color in the lettering so it would be white.

Now that looks cool.

World's coolest go-kart.

You may notice that by this time I had made some block-off plates for the open holes on the engine.  I put masking tape over the holes, then cut cardboard to size and poked holes in each piece of cardboard to bolt it in place.  Hopefully that will keep the tape from peeling up.

You might also notice in the earlier pictures that there is a shift linkage on the transmission.  I had been pretty intimidated by the thought of installing this shift linkage, because I'd never done it before and I really had no idea what went where.  Well, YouTube to the rescue again, I found a video that was made by the guy I bought my transmission from, and he showed how to install a Hurst shifter on a Muncie 4-speed.  It's about 45 minutes long, but by the time I'd watched it all the way through, I no longer felt intimidated.

Everybody says the Hurst shifter is the best for the Muncie, but there is no Hurst shifter available specifically for the 1965 Impala anymore, so I got a universal Hurst shifter.  It all went together smoothly, though, just like the video showed.

The only problem was that the universal shifter does not provide a place to connect a linkage for the switch that turns on the reverse lights when the transmission is in reverse.  My first thought was to just drill a hole in the reverse arm from the universal kit, but when I started to look into that, I realized that the hole was going to have to go in an area where there was already another hole, or a clip, or some other interference.  My next idea was to try ordering some of the stock 1965 reverse linkage parts off of EBay, but they were not compatible with the universal linkage.  If you watched the video, then you saw the adapter clips that go over the arm mounting studs.  I ended up using this piece to solve my problem.  The stock clip is shown at top in the photo below, looking vaguely reminiscent of a Batman logo:

The yellow piece in the middle of the photo is a paper template I made, for a custom piece that would do the job of the adapter clip, but also provide an extension that could take a hole to mount a linkage to the reverse light switch.  The black piece at the bottom is the piece that I made out of steel to do that job.  I also gave it a little "shadetree heat treat," getting it red hot with a Bernz-O-Matic torch and then quenching it in water.

Below are pictures showing the assembly put together, first with the transmission in neutral, and then in reverse.

You can see that in reverse the reverse arm moves back, and it pulls the reverse light switch arm back as well, switching on the reverse lights.  I got the switch from Year One (I think), and I got the switch mounting bracket off EBay.  For the linkage between the two arms, I used threaded buttons and clips that are used in the Corvair throttle linkage, and I ordered those from Clark's Corvair Parts.  I ordered the rod they're threaded onto from McMaster-Carr.  I bent that so it would curve up over the switch mounting bracket.  Because the buttons thread onto the rod, you can adjust its effective length by changing how far they are threaded on.  The arrangement seems to work OK, as verified with a multimeter.

For now I have a black shift knob on the shifter as a placeholder, but I had to check out how it would look with this cool white knob with 4-speed pattern.

So that's pretty much the point I'd gotten to by the time I called the body shop to let him know I was ready to bring him the chassis.  When he said he wasn't ready for it just now, I decided to start trying to figure out how to mount all my engine accessories (alternator, water pump, power steering pump).  The problem is that I took this engine out of my 1972 Monte Carlo, which used Chevrolet's "long" water pump, so all the brackets I had were made to go with the long water pump.  The 1965 Impala used the "short" water pump, so those brackets won't work with it.  Below is a photo showing the old Monte Carlo pump (right) and the new Impala pump (left), and you can see that the "long" pump sits a little higher off the ground.

I would have just used the Monte Carlo arrangement, but I wasn't sure if the long water pump would fit behind the radiator in the '65 Impala.  Also, the more I looked at 1965 Impala stuff, the more I decided I just liked the look of the '65 accessory arrangement, and I wanted mine to look like that.

As it turns out, it's probably a lot easier to mess with all that accessory stuff without the body around the engine, so it probably works out better that the body shop wasn't ready for the chassis just now.  Details on the accessory drive, etc., still to come....