Builds Marshmallow's build thread (4 Viewers)

[nukegoat]

I imagine this as being narrated by Clint Eastwood in a very "get off my lawn" tone.

10/10 would read again.

Lol nahhh. I wish I had documented the evolution a bit better but so it goes

 

[Malleus]

Lots to like here...

I would have traded any three guys I worked with at Dana for you.

 

[2fpower]

Been dreaming of how to do the rear suspension for upcoming portal axles. Thanks for the pics of what you did to link it. Any changes you would make?

 

[nukegoat]

Lots to like here...

I would have traded any three guys I worked with at Dana for you.

You should see my gear patterns!

 

[nukegoat]

Been dreaming of how to do the rear suspension for upcoming portal axles. Thanks for the pics of what you did to link it. Any changes you would make?

In the rear? I can think of really only two areas of improvement.

For one, I would potentially consider cutting off the factory upper mounts and just welding on tabs to do a "normal" double triangulated 4-link. It's more invasive, though, and any factory link bracket is ridiculously well attached so I liked the idea of keeping them. That said, it was a bit more cumbersome to fabricate the wishbone and it's a non-adjustable member, so all the adjustment (alignment, pinion angle, and overall wheelbase) is done with the lowers which means it's impossible to isolate those adjustments. But, that said, if you get the wishbone right, it's a non-issue. Anyone looking to replicate it would probably best be advised to just think through the manufacturing/building process of creating a wishbone in significant detail before breaking out the welder and grinder. So not an improvement in the geometry but just a trade-off in terms of spending time cutting off the upper brackets on the frame (near all the wires and brake lines... ehhh) vs getting the wishbone right.

Secondly, and this one is more philosophical, I think a lot of the optimization around the gas tank location could be called into question. My rig isn't a buggy or anything but freeing up all the space underneath the vehicle would have allowed more design freedom overall. Mainly this may improve some ground clearance stuff, but that can only go so far anyway due to lots of other stuff starting to dangle around down there. But that said, if any transfer case doubler ever comes into existence (I sorta doubt it) or one decides to do an engine swap and run a "normal" centered rear output, the gas tank is going to be a problem. And I wouldn't really want a smaller tank anyway. So I'm not convinced we should just start swapping out tanks just yet, but I think it's not something to take completely off the table for those looking to go a little more extreme.

 

[nukegoat]

So F**king awesome. I'm glad I'm not the only one that doesn't steam-clean and repaint every bolt when I remove stuff.

I would be interested in more shots of that front 3-link - it looks super clean. I know you don't have that setup anymore but if you have anything in the archives that'd be awesome. Looks like that "lowers" are on the inside of the frame rails? Or maybe that picture is deceiving.

This is correct. @richardlillard1 drove all the way from AZ to buy my old axles and will be duplicating my design, but he and I shared a text exchange about the location of the lower link mounts.

Hold on - I'm about to get opinionated.

OK, when designing linked suspensions, I'm now of the opinion that while trade-offs and optimizations are going to be inevitable, you should basically start with this thought process. By the time you get to the end of the list, you may choose another approach for an earlier step.

1) Monuments and physical constraints. What fits where? I used to just argue that if it doesn't fit, cut it off and weld another one on. Or make it fit. That sort of thing. The problem with this approach is that it often leads to a royal PITA for servicing, installation, etc. Or it just unpeels the onion way further than it needs to be peeled. So if you have to move something to make something work, just think really hard about it first (i.e. the gas tank - see my previous post).

2) Roll axis - This is more than just a single number, it's how it behaves under travel. And, as I learned in my 5-link exercise, the magnitude of this effect based on your suspension design (radius arms with roll axis issues = less bad than 3-link with roll axis issues). But overall, you want a neutral setup. It works better off-road, it *is* safer on-road, etc.

3) Bump steer / flex steer - Beyond just getting your track bar and drag link in alignment, triangulation in 3-links will cause a steering behavior.

4) Instant Center / wheel recession - Don't have your suspension just annoyingly unload every time you try to go over an obstacle.

5) All the other behavioral characteristics of the suspension (or as many as you can wrap your head around - there are tons) - Pinion behavior through suspension travel, squat/dive, etc. These are all somewhat important but usually easy to solve for.

6) Ground clearance - OK, I'm not saying don't worry about this, but the biggest monuments for ground clearance are going to be your axles, skid plates, body, etc. It's not great to get hung up on links but if you have a well performing suspension that drives safely, you can probably hammer down a little bit to get over obstacles. So, do the best you can, but get the other stuff right first. My $0.02 anyway.

Alright - so my 3-link. You can basically either raise the track bar (and drag link, requiring high steer, and then you're going to get close to the frame rails on stuff, so that sort of sucks), raise the lower links (I think I went as far as humanly possible here), or triangulate the lower links. Triangulating lower links, if you read my diatribe above, will cause some flex steer as the axle shifts left and right during travel. So a little bit is unnoticeable, but having angled links with a lot of triangulation may look good from a clearance POV but drive like crap. That said, you still have to clear tires and nobody wants the frame mounts hanging 6" below the frame, so a litlte bit of triangulation gets you the last mile after you've raised the lowers and flattened them as much as possible. @richardlillard1 is going to try using the factory lower locations, which are going to be a few inches outboard of where I had them when I had that axle, and on paper it should perform ok but slightly more oversteery than mine were. I'm guessing it'll be fine but you may want to see his results first.

 

[nukegoat]

Could you also throw up a couple photos of the less than ideal but tucked up high exhaust re-route?

I really don't have any handy but it's terrible. To this guy's credit, he told me that for the radii that I was looking for I should be using mandrel bent pieces (or a complete mandrel-bent exhaust) but I had $300 and a few hours of patience. In the bay area, a reputable exhaust shop to do mandrel bent exhaust is upwards of $1000 from my few phone calls. So I told him just to distort the tube away. After expletives about little bits of mud and crap falling in his eye for a few hours, he started to get a bit more aggressive with the bender and then it was done. I thikn he even went from 2.25" to like 2" for the final stretch because he ruined so many pieces along the way.

> 4000RPM is not my friend

 

[Malleus]

You should see my gear patterns!

Our assembly rule of thumb was if the pattern was centered from the tip to the root and 80% of the contact area was covered, we sent it down the line. It's like everything else, guys who build these things everyday can't be bothered to obsess about them the way someone who does this once in his life will.

True story, the axle assembly line supervisor used to race dirttrack hereabouts. He always took his axles to a "race shop" in Mooresville (that's Dale Jr. country, doncha know) to have them built prior to a race. He got no end to the amount of sh*t for the next several weeks after a race from the engineers when he complained about how he knew more than we did about building axles.

 

[nukegoat]

Our assembly rule of thumb was if the pattern was centered from the tip to the root and 80% of the contact area was covered, we sent it down the line. It's like everything else, guys who build these things everyday can't be bothered to obsess about them the way someone who does this once in his life will.

True story, the axle assembly line supervisor used to race dirttrack hereabouts. He always took his axles to a "race shop" in Mooresville (that's Dale Jr. country, doncha know) to have them built prior to a race. He got no end to the amount of sh*t for the next several weeks after a race from the engineers when he complained about how he knew more than we did about building axles.

Yeah, I can't fault Dana for getting it "good enough", especially given manufacturing tolerances in gearsets and so on. Plus, for the standard life of a differential, most gear patterns as you described are more than "good enough" and it's probably cheaper anyway to deal with the occasional incident than it is to try to get every one of them perfect. Just business. No arguments here. I'm pretty sure most rear-end shops just start with the checking distance and if it looks good enough, slap it back together and call it a day.

 

[Malleus]

We used to send shim measurements with each axle for exactly that reason. The rationale was that if the diff casting was the same, the shim measurements from the original gears would give the repairer a quick way to find an acceptable new shim for a new gearset. Most of the time, it worked. When it didn't, someone filled out an expense report.

 

[nukegoat]

We used to send shim measurements with each axle for exactly that reason. The rationale was that if the diff casting was the same, the shim measurements from the original gears would give the repairer a quick way to find an acceptable new shim for a new gearset. Most of the time, it worked. When it didn't, someone filled out an expense report.

But since each casting is machined, didn't that present some strangeness?

BTW, the "super" dana 70 I stole the spindles and hubs from on my rear axle used the spanner wheels like a GM 14-bolt or toyota diff for setting preload on the carrier bearings. I really liked that. Is that going to be a permanent trend or was it just a weird oddity for a few years?

 

[Malleus]

Good question. The off-highway designs where slightly different from the on-highway designs. Same housing, gearsets, etc, but some minor differences. Mainly to do with the service intervals; industrial customers ran their equipment until it smoked then buried it, agricultural customers ran theirs until it caught fire, then tore it apart and fixed it themselves. On-highway customers, including over the road truckers, use repair shops so their maintenance/repair frequency is higher.

The first group didn't care how easy something was to tear down and rebuild, as long as it could be done. The second group wanted their stuff back from the shop quick, so those designs were meant to be a little easier to service.

Since Toyota originally used the Army Duece-and-a-Half as the base design for the first Land Cruiser (at least as I've been told), the drivetrain designs have organically progressed from off-highway origins, rather than on-highway designs like the pickups. So that may explain a little about the how and why the Land Cruiser engines and drivetrains looked the way they did, at least until Toyota adopted Microsoft's cost-of-goods design philosophy and started sharing parts all over the place.

 

[2fpower]

In the rear? I can think of really only two areas of improvement.

For one, I would potentially consider cutting off the factory upper mounts and just welding on tabs to do a "normal" double triangulated 4-link. It's more invasive, though, and any factory link bracket is ridiculously well attached so I liked the idea of keeping them. That said, it was a bit more cumbersome to fabricate the wishbone and it's a non-adjustable member, so all the adjustment (alignment, pinion angle, and overall wheelbase) is done with the lowers which means it's impossible to isolate those adjustments. But, that said, if you get the wishbone right, it's a non-issue. Anyone looking to replicate it would probably best be advised to just think through the manufacturing/building process of creating a wishbone in significant detail before breaking out the welder and grinder. So not an improvement in the geometry but just a trade-off in terms of spending time cutting off the upper brackets on the frame (near all the wires and brake lines... ehhh) vs getting the wishbone right.

Secondly, and this one is more philosophical, I think a lot of the optimization around the gas tank location could be called into question. My rig isn't a buggy or anything but freeing up all the space underneath the vehicle would have allowed more design freedom overall. Mainly this may improve some ground clearance stuff, but that can only go so far anyway due to lots of other stuff starting to dangle around down there. But that said, if any transfer case doubler ever comes into existence (I sorta doubt it) or one decides to do an engine swap and run a "normal" centered rear output, the gas tank is going to be a problem. And I wouldn't really want a smaller tank anyway. So I'm not convinced we should just start swapping out tanks just yet, but I think it's not something to take completely off the table for those looking to go a little more extreme.

paging @cjmoon - cleanup on isle 4.

 

[nukegoat]

Good question. The off-highway designs where slightly different from the on-highway designs. Same housing, gearsets, etc, but some minor differences. Mainly to do with the service intervals; industrial customers ran their equipment until it smoked then buried it, agricultural customers ran theirs until it caught fire, then tore it apart and fixed it themselves. On-highway customers, including over the road truckers, use repair shops so their maintenance/repair frequency is higher.

The first group didn't care how easy something was to tear down and rebuild, as long as it could be done. The second group wanted their stuff back from the shop quick, so those designs were meant to be a little easier to service.

Since Toyota originally used the Army Duece-and-a-Half as the base design for the first Land Cruiser (at least as I've been told), the drivetrain designs have organically progressed from off-highway origins, rather than on-highway designs like the pickups. So that may explain a little about the how and why the Land Cruiser engines and drivetrains looked the way they did, at least until Toyota adopted Microsoft's cost-of-goods design philosophy and started sharing parts all over the place.

Interesting. So dana lists the 6.17 gearsets for industrial use. They arent noisy and look just like any other gears but is there a design difference that isnt obvious?

 

[nukegoat]

Alright, so I got back from the hammers and I'm not sure I did much to the rig. Along the way, of course, there's little projects here and there but nothing substantial. Just business as usual. I may have removed the LSPV or ABS at this point, I don't really remember. All I seem to have photos of, though, is my next wheeling trip for that year - Fordyce & Rubicon. Because you can't spell Rubicon without Hammers, we sort of called this trip "Hamdyceicon" which admittedly doesn't make much sense.

It happens:

And these don't look like 37s to me but the camera adds 500 lbs.

Amusing video on winch hill 1:

 

[nukegoat]

OK, well, I might as well hit the Dusy. At like midnight:

Aaaand there wasn't many pics at this point because after 9 miles of mild bumpy dusty road, my upper link mount broke off. The entire front part of the tower wasn't welded on (I uhhhh... forgot? Not sure how it survived as long as it did) and it decided to take a vacation from the axle.

But the fix was to borrow a flux core welder some guys had with them and sort of weld a piece of angle to the bracket and then run a bolt with a ratchet strap through the lower mounting hole and around the axle tube. Then creep back out of there. I'll go back and finish the trail but this is really not my style of wheeling overall. Plus I was fairly sick and ended up coming home and sleeping for several days. But it sucked. I had to fix the rig to take a trip to pismo so the next weekend I put on a proper upper link tower:

Aaaand correct. @richardlillard1 can rest safe on this one:

 

[nukegoat]

PROJECT TIME! OK, so now the 2015 wheeling season was over and it was time to do some mods for 2016, or something.

First order of business, upgrade the wheel hub studs with bolts. Some people don't consider this an upgrade but these survived everything I ever put them through and made accessing the wheel bearings, removing brake rotors, and other general service significantly simpler. One nuisance is that they don't like to let the wheel come off. SCHS would be better probably.

Next, let's buy the $800 marlin crawler gears and let trail gear come out with a likely-just-as-good-but-only-$300-set-of-gears immediately after. And let's also not part-time it while I'm in there, or remove the viscous coupler. In retrospect I can argue in favor of my decision, but I think I would have done it differently if I were to take it out again. As some of you know, the xfer case is a big, heavy, awkward, and frustrating thing to take off, and even worse to put back on... without a transmission cradle anyway.

Then, let's re-gear the front diff because the pinion was sloppy. A while back wayyyy earlier I had MS Auto Gears in Santa Clara regear both 3rds and install the OG longfields for me. They did the whole frontend rebuild and regear for like $750 labor, which is pretty cheap. That said, I'm not sure if their install was loose or if the abuse had caused one of the carrier bearings to lose preload, but overall, it had been long enough and it was time to rip into the front 3rd. I replaced most of the bearings and set-up the gears again myself. For what it's worth, if I weren't inclined to DIY, @gearinstalls.com would be where I'd send my 3rds. You can't beat his quality of work but he's also the most legitimately helpful guy I've met on this stuff.

Then I decided to drill and tap my steering box for hydro assist and I ran a ram to the front. Another benefit of this arrangement is that you can run a hydro assist ram directly to a RHD steering arm. The arm was simply drilled out to 5/8 and the ram installed. This was after I had bent pinion splines once. Not worried about steering any more. Hydro assist is GREAT - do yourself a favor and follow suit if you have the inclination. @jcardona1 will agree, I hope - it's so much better than fighting the steering wheel on everything! Running the ram behind the arm is possible too but you'll need a 10" throw ram. I prefer this approach. I also made this skid plate protector thingie which occasionally got tagged on rocks.

 

[nukegoat]

OK, hammers 2016. Day 1 was lower big johnson, upper big johnson, boulderdash, clawhammer,tackhammer, and chocolate thunder. Hydro assist shoved rocks out of the way, 3.1 transfer case gears was a win, and I felt better about the front diff in a lot of ways.

Day 2 was Jackhammer and Jack North:

Day 3 was... I don't know. Rest? Something like that

Day 4 was outer limits:

Day 5 was Aftershock, with yet another visit to depreciation knob, in the exact same friggin location as the first time, pretty much sealing this vehicles fate as looking like a haggard piece of crap:

 

[nukegoat]

So here's the rear axle that @richardlillard1 bought from me. I spray painted over the scrapes so he won't know the difference. Sweet point of interest - it's ghetto for sure but you can see my rear e-locker guard over there on the right.

 

[Malleus]

PROJECT TIME! OK, so now the 2015 wheeling season was over and it was time to do some mods for 2016, or something.

First order of business, upgrade the wheel hub studs with bolts. Some people don't consider this an upgrade but these survived everything I ever put them through and made accessing the wheel bearings, removing brake rotors, and other general service significantly simpler. One nuisance is that they don't like to let the wheel come off. SCHS would be better probably.

Next, let's buy the $800 marlin crawler gears and let trail gear come out with a likely-just-as-good-but-only-$300-set-of-gears immediately after. And let's also not part-time it while I'm in there, or remove the viscous coupler. In retrospect I can argue in favor of my decision, but I think I would have done it differently if I were to take it out again. As some of you know, the xfer case is a big, heavy, awkward, and frustrating thing to take off, and even worse to put back on... without a transmission cradle anyway.

Then, let's re-gear the front diff because the pinion was sloppy. A while back wayyyy earlier I had MS Auto Gears in Santa Clara regear both 3rds and install the OG longfields for me. They did the whole frontend rebuild and regear for like $750 labor, which is pretty cheap. That said, I'm not sure if their install was loose or if the abuse had caused one of the carrier bearings to lose preload, but overall, it had been long enough and it was time to rip into the front 3rd. I replaced most of the bearings and set-up the gears again myself. For what it's worth, if I weren't inclined to DIY, @gearinstalls.com would be where I'd send my 3rds. You can't beat his quality of work but he's also the most legitimately helpful guy I've met on this stuff.

Then I decided to drill and tap my steering box for hydro assist and I ran a ram to the front. Another benefit of this arrangement is that you can run a hydro assist ram directly to a RHD steering arm. The arm was simply drilled out to 5/8 and the ram installed. This was after I had bent pinion splines once. Not worried about steering any more. Hydro assist is GREAT - do yourself a favor and follow suit if you have the inclination. @jcardona1 will agree, I hope - it's so much better than fighting the steering wheel on everything! Running the ram behind the arm is possible too but you'll need a 10" throw ram. I prefer this approach. I also made this skid plate protector thingie which occasionally got tagged on rocks.

Sexy. Your gearstand looks like the one on the assembly line; the only difference was ours was floor mounted.