Project: Midnight Panic

ridered3 said:
That’s a big ole axle!
Click to expand...
Pretty beefy,
This is the same axles next to a Torque rear steer 14 bolt with the big Crane Magnum knuckles for size comparison.
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I've been trying to be patient waiting for powder coating on the chassis, It's been a slow process since the shop doing the work had to actually make their oven larger to fit the chassis, On top of that the shop owner has a second buisiness doing wedding venue/festival stuff, & it's wedding/festival season!
For the most part it worked out since the family & myself made our annual trip to Mountain Hom ID for Idaho tuff truck challenge,
This year was another exceptional event with the kiddo riding co-driver for all 4 courses,
A small issue with a fuse on the first event kept us from placing very well overall, but good times were had all day long & we finished the day big on the rock course,
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Waiting for PC also provided the opportunity to start working on driveline containment, since the axles are just sitting here, & I had slapped some mounting tabs on the housings before painting the diffs,

Normally in monster truck, or mega truck applications a couple pieces of bent tubing from the housing tabs to a 6-8 inch pipe around yoke/U-joint is the base for the drive line cage, (Here is a kit available on line)
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To start this project I went to the local scrap yard & picked up about 5ft of 8 inch pipe,
I then employed the roller seup on the fab table along with the welding jig to hold the plasma cutter, this made short work of cutting 4 inch long sections of the pipe,



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The outside diameter was turned down to decrease wall thickness, & clean up the rough finish, Also both ends/cuts were machined to length while they were in the lathe,

Having a helper at the shop is kind of rare, so I used the new CNC router to cut a 3rd hand out of MDF,
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Bolted to the yoke/flange
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Now the pipe ring can stay in place while I figure out how to attach it to the axle housing,
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I originally planned on using some 1.5" DOM to mount this ring, But honestly I don't care for how the big 90* sweeps look, & the diff lock actuator prevented a strait shot approach,
So I went with a plate design, strait shot with a notch to clear the actuator,
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That's as far as I can go with the containments until I get the axles/suspension & chassis reassembled,
 
Powder coat is finished & reassembly has started, but it might be a little bit before I get a good update to post,
I spent the last 4 days bolting parts back on, re-installing plumbing & wiring, Along with painting/coating other parts,
Even refining some parts I built years ago,

Like this master cylinder mounting block,
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It’s a nice part, & should function well, but when I got ready to install it, I remembered wanting to remove a lot of unnecessary girth, which would be tedious on the manual Bridgeport,

However, I have CNC capabilities now!
In the above pic you can see I machined a pocket in a sheet of MDF, the aluminum block is a slight press fit into this picket, then a small bolt & large washer hood the part down just for safety.
Based on the pocket location, a profile vector was created that closely matched the mounting surface on the master cylinder,
First the rough cut, then a finish cut, followed by chamfer/de-burring, & finally a little engraving work to finish it off.
Here’s a quick Timelapse of the whole process,


The final product turned out pretty decent.
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gt1guy said:
In the vid of the guy spraying the chassis, I assume that was the powder going on?
That looked like a giant open area and the overspray was going straight up.
Click to expand...

Yes that is the powder being applied,
He’s setup in what use to be an auto body shop, so I know there’s a paint booth & his oven in there,
I’m not sure if there is any other form of ventilation that might create that effect with the powder, or if that’s just no normal for what he’s doing.
 
Skipped_Link said:
Yes that is the powder being applied,
He’s setup in what use to be an auto body shop, so I know there’s a paint booth & his oven in there,
I’m not sure if there is any other form of ventilation that might create that effect with the powder, or if that’s just no normal for what he’s doing.
Click to expand...
He has ventilation.
 
Grendel said:
He has ventilation.
Click to expand...
I know for sure he uses the filter/ventilation setup of the paint booth itself, even if not powdering in the booth, (you can see in the video the booth door is wide open)

I’m just not sure if there’s anything in addition to that.
 
Finally, I am able to get an update posted,
A couple weeks ago I got the chassis back from powder coat, & even got a start on reassembly, but I had to pause a bit this last weekend for our local 4wd event. With that finished up for the year I can go back to focusing on this project,
The plus side of the event was having a couple friends from out of town here for a few days, & the extra hands came in very handy!

There's not a lot to explain or describe this update, so if you have 7 min or so, here's time laps of a good portion of reassembly,

 
Allison & I talked about chassis color, & she was pretty insistent that it was something flashy/bright, & I was pretty set on not having a standard primary, secondary, ect color,

We settled on Prismatic Powders "Superchrome" for the main chassis & Speedway gray for contrast on the accessories,

My buddy Warren did a phenomenal job on what is really quite a big project,

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Once back home & unloaded every threaded hole was chased, & non threaded hole was reamed,
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It's been some time looking at Clecos holding some parts in place, to see them permanently mounted is pretty satisfying,
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Clearly I did not time-lapse everything that got reinstalled,
Gauges, wiring, plumbing, etc is just too tedious to include in the video,
But most of it is in there now,
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With any luck we'll get to drive it out of the shop this weekend,
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I've just spent a combined total of about 4.6 hours reading this thread in it entirety.

Here's where I'm at---

I thought my project build was going well, but now it's pretty clear that it is a colossal piece of shit, and I just need to set it on fire and find a different hobby. Lol.

Seriously, thank you for posting this build. Not only did you fill the downtime of two whole shifts at work, you've actually lent some level of inspiration towards my project.

I thought for sure, somewhere around page 7 or 8, id get to see it done. Excited to follow along for the finale
 
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