Father & Son Build - Double Sheared Shock Mount

The chassis work is winding down for the most part and one major piece of the rear end, the rear shock mounts are finally finished. Sam and Nathan got the rear sub frame fabricated and installed a few weeks ago, then they found a rear shock mounting location that allowed a good amount of travel without cutting through the rear fender well. That location was off of one of the rear spring plate mounting bolts. So with the lower shock point decided on, Sam spent an afternoon getting the mounting point braced on both sides of the shock. This is referred to as a double sheared mount, so that both sides of the shock are supported and is substantially stronger than mounting the shock on only one side. This is a little shorter video, especially compared to last weeks long floor pan video, but might give you an idea of how to come up with your own custom mount or bracket for whatever project you might be working on.

Video Transcript

Hi guys, I'm Sam. And I'm Nate. In this video, we got our lower shock mount all boxed in. Forgive the lack of continuity; it was a whole bunch of work over the course of two weekends with Thanksgiving in between. Follow along to see what I came up with.

I guess while that stuff's drying, I will get to work on these trailing arms. Got to cut this back further here because our shock will mount right here, and I don't want the shock running into this edge right here. So, I'm going to cut that further back and then up, and then maybe I can start to work on getting a double shear mount for this guy in place. Seems like a good thing as any to do, right?

So, I've got this one marked. I'll cut it and go from there.

Not a whole lot more I can get out of that guy—not like there's much more out of this one I can get either, but we'll give it a shot. There we go. There, no longer in my way. Let's come through and polish those edges off.

Now I can work on doing some double shears on these guys.

Why does this thing keep on stopping? Why are you powering off?

Let's just start from scratch.

This big plate right here will barely work, but it will work.

This is a whole bunch of cutting and grinding and whatnot. You guys don't care about this, so I'm not going to bother recording all this. I'll show you what I’m done though.

You guys get a little bit better view from the top; hopefully, you can see everything I’m working on. So, I've got that plate right about there. Yeah, I'm going to leave it like that. All right, I think I’m going to clamp this in and then go through and do a couple of welds on here. Then, I’ll mark that and hopefully drill this with it in place. I found a spacer hole saw that is just ever so slightly wider than the shock boss sleeve by about one millimeter. That'll give me some wiggle room to put the shock in there. Should be plenty clear.

That will work nicely.

I don’t think that’s going anywhere.

Like a glove!

All right, so that's the start of our double shear plate: welded inside and out, bolt holes drilled through. Now I will work on gusseting up this bottom. I’ll do the same thing here—bend that guy more flat. Oh, that’s still really warm! I’ll weld a plate across the top of that and then do something similar across the top here to box in the top side.

Again, that's a whole bunch of boring cutting, grinding, and welding. I’m not going to bore you guys with that.

I’m trying to spend a little bit more time cleaning up as I go, so my workbench is kind of cleaned up, my table’s cleaned up. I’ve got four cut out. These will lay in there; I’ll weld them in place and then bend them over and weld up that seam top and bottom. That will provide some strength to our double shear mount or our outer brace for our shock mount. So, I’m going to work on all that.

This is still quite warm, but now we got it in place. Let’s test it out. Well, at no point does the shock ever point backward, so I call that a win.

Now that these are all done, we’ll let them cool down. We’ll come in, clean up all the welding spatter with a sanding wheel, and these guys are ready for complete disassembly. I’ll pull out the bearings, pull out the pivot bushings, clean up everything, and these guys are ready for paint. Not bad.

So, with that, we’re all done. We got our shock mount supported on the outside, braced on the top, braced on the bottom. You can see here this little top mark where I’ll actually go through and clearance this out just a little bit. Because, as you can see here, with the trailing arm all the way bottomed out, this top mount is pretty close to our shock can, which is not very good.

With all this done, we can get to mounting up our engine rear bumper, making sure that we’ve got room for our air conditioning condenser and the dryer for our AC, and just start buttoning things up here in the back—getting the tabs mounted in place for everything so that we know we can do everything that we want to do. That’ll be in videos to come.

And with that, I’m Sam. And I’m Nate. Life’s full of good people. If you can’t find one, be one. Later, guys!