Father & Son Build - Notching Spring Plates

Video Transcript

Hi guys, I'm Sam. And I'm Nate. Now that we've got our camber fixed on our control arms, we're going to go through and start getting them notched and set up so we can get the maximum amount of travel possible. Because off-roading.

You don’t want to bottom out on a little rock when you have over a foot of ground clearance. What we want to do now is… alright, grab one of the CV joints. It's a good thing I have gloves on. Yeah, these sides are free floats; this one isn’t. Let's mock up. Since we’re just mocking it up for now, could you spin a couple of bolts in to get a couple started? I don’t know if they’re started—nothing. Gloves are nice… there we go, good and tight enough for now.

Alright, we’re dropped out, so we’ve got plenty of room there. You’ve got travel, lots of travel. I don’t think that matters; by the time we get there, the tire will be inside the… so I’m going to do… do you want it to be able to have more droop or no? What, going down. Do you want the arms to go down more to get more lift? That would probably be good, right? That’d be better for clearance. Yeah, so we’ll do a small notch on the bottom, a quarter inch on the spring plates, and then we’re just going to notch the top of the spring plates where we’ve already marked. Because travel aint’t an issue, you can get a lot of travel out of the bottom of these things. We’re probably going to need a limit strap, too. Uh, possibly. I mean, at this point, the shocks are going to be the limit.

Yeah, I mean, after this is done, we’ve got to do a subframe on the rear shocks, and then we can paint the whole thing or pull the front end off, flip the chassis over, clean up the bottom of it, get it all painted up and detailed on the bottom side. Then get the floor pans welded in, then we can actually paint the chassis, and then all the suspension and whatnot, and we can start assembling.

Alright. Transmission… I guess it can kind of hang out for now. It’s not really in the way, but for now, we need to pull the wheels off, pull off the parking brakes, pull off the axles, so we can pull all that stuff out and kind of set it to the side.

Spin you guys around that way just a touch so you can see that mark. Try and transfer that over to this side. Pretty good? Pretty good… nice mark. That’s a nice, straight line; make sure that’s going to be clear. In reality, no, we’re going to pull that back on… probably right about… put it way out. We’re going to have to come out pretty good on that.

Right about there… I’m going to drill a hole for that corner, and then I’ll cut into it and cut into it. Done with the sparkies? I haven’t even started the sparkies. You can pull the other side off; I’m still drilling this one. I was going to say, I wish I knew what happened to my center punch. Going to pull that trailing arm off, 19 mm, and then the pivot bolt… 19 mm up on top and then the pivot bolt right there.

So, how do you do this? Trick way around on your… there you go, cut there, cut there.

I’ll be driving this way, so sparks shouldn’t be bothering you. Now we’re just going to come through and clean up all those sharp edges and make sure it’s all nice and clean cut with no serrations; that will help prevent any hard points for a crack. If it was a race car, you’d actually go through and polish it, but we’re not racing.

Well, it’s getting up there, but I don’t think we’ll need to really go back any further than that. But actually, I think I’m going to take this down to right about there, just to be clear of anything right here. That’s good; that gives us all the up travel we need—probably more than we’re going to be able to use, but that’s fine. Next, get that one taken care of.

Boom, that one’s done. Now, worry about these spring plates, spring plate off, beating off these spring plate caps, and pulling off these spring plate bushings. You hang out there. Alright, so now you see what we’re trying to do. We need to cut from this line up so that this arm can travel down further. We’re going to cut in about a quarter of an inch or so, then cut back, and then we’ll polish this off. Because these are under load, it’s very possible that this section right here where we cut and notch could actually come through and start to split because this is a spring plate made of spring steel. That’s our next step.

I’m done with the trailing arms; now I’m doing the spring plates—shouldn’t be much more.

Oh yeah, looks good, looks all fancy. We can get literally too much travel… you can, but we’re not going to have to worry about that; we’ve got plenty of travel with these CV joints. I’m seeing we’re nowhere near the limits.

Alright, used to sit there; now we drop down to there. What’s up there, Sparky? I’m going to cut that back a little bit further on that corner right there. I think, yeah, go back a little bit more, even though it has plenty already. Right, not quite. Do you want to pull off that spring plate over there, 15 mm right there, and just like that, it’s all taken apart again.

Alright, now you’ve got to grab the hammer and the flathead screwdriver and pull the spring plate bushings off. Yeah, pry that one off, and then pop the metal cap off.

Oh, the fancy new bushings! Well, not fancy, but they are new. Bushings, yeah, better than the old ones, right? Yep, fancier than nothing. Yeah, nothing is… not very… nothing. Not very fancy at all.

There you go. And this is why we haven’t painted the chassis yet.

And down here, that gives us… you know, that gives us a lot more travel down here. I’m going to cut that… because travel… because all the travel.

Where’d the other one go? Just get them loose and then tighten them. Get all four.

Boom! Yeah, all the travels. Oh my gosh, more travels than we had before. I know. I mean, it can be really low now. I mean, the big tires kind of take up most of that. I mean, just think, now the CV has to go there, which even then is fine, huh? Yeah, and also, all the way down is only slight camber. That’s good, huh? Yeah, there’s one more bolt down in there too. We got all the nuts… is this good? Can I use this? Just use… grab this and use that. Good idea, because I need this.

Alright, we stop dropping things on that wheel. Let’s pull that out. Well, I don’t know if there’s much more we can do for tonight. Yeah, that’s much more dropped than we had before. How much travel would we have, then? I don’t know; let’s find out. Measure to the eyelet: 13 and a half inches and… oh my gosh, 29 and a half. I think that’s a little bit more than the front… 16 inches of travel.

Yeah, it’s a bit more than the front. Are we actually going to get that much travel once we have shocks in here? Probably not, but I mean, we only had, what, 7 and a half up front. 7 and a half up front, yeah. With shocks, who knows.

Yeah, I think maybe tomorrow after work, I’ll run over to Interstate and grab some steel, inch and a half. So where are you thinking from? Like, we’re going to go from here up to somewhere around here. Yeah, have to get the body…Yeah, we’ll have to get the body in place. Probably like maybe tomorrow, start doing some of that mock-up to get this guy to this guy.

I can’t wait for the chassis to be complete and then we start working on bodywork. Yeah, to build anything, you’ve got to have a good foundation. This is our foundation; we’re going to get the foundation ready to rock.

Alright, a little bit of work tonight, getting our trailing arm notched and our spring plate notched, and now we have the potential for 16 inches of travel, currently. Once we get the shock in place, that’s probably not going to happen. I mean, if we cut through the body and had giant shock towers—which I don’t want to do, we’re not trying to cut into the body—but even then, I imagine we’re probably still going to end up with maybe 10 to 12 inches of travel. That would be nice; we’ll see how it comes out.

So we’re going to call it a wrap for tonight. And until next time, I’m Sam. And I’m Nate. And life’s full of good people; if you can’t find one, be one. Later, guys!