Copyright 2008 by Morris Rosenthal - All Rights Reserved
| Building a Car |
Moved all of my car troubleshooting and repair stuff to a new siteIf I wanted to spend the next several years reinventing the wheel, I'd probably start with a frame that held two seats, provided room for a small truck bed, then proceeded with desiging the steering and suspension. I'm not going to do that, it's too much work for no gain I can imagine. I'm betting I'll be able to find a suitable small pickup or even an economy car from a rust-free state to transform into a morrismobile. I've never been in a car that didn't steer decently, road conditions allowing, and while some had pretty lousy rides, I'm about as indifferent to suspension as you can get. In fact, I never got around to changing the struts in the Omni, which is twenty years old next month. Sits a little low, perhaps, but handles fine with new radials:-) My primary worry about steering and suspension is that it will get in the way. For example, an electrical conversion on a newer front wheel drive vehicle would be much tougher to pull off, from the design standpoint, than on a rear wheel drive, just due to the geometry. A small pickup truck would inherantly provide space for messy battery and monitoring experiments, not to mention getting me up the driveway of this farm I'm planning on buying. On the other hand, I'm used to thinking of front wheel drive cars with the engine and transaxle in, but once you pull them out, there's plenty of room and a nice compartment to do it in, and you get pretty light vehicle if you strip out some of the excess garbage. So, does it count as building a car if one starts with an old junk, or even a new junk, pulls the drive train and moves forward? I think so, or at least it's all I'm aspiring to at the moment. I've seen some of the designed-from-scratch electric cars, like the ones sold commercially in India, and while I suspect they are brilliant in their conception, it wll take another 500% rise in gasoline prices before you'd see many on the roads in the U.S. this is another of those placeholder pages that I don't plan on touching until I really get under way in the shop. I'm not going to think about suspension and steering, I'm going to buy them. There's plenty of other stuff that goes into a standard car, just check out your shop manuals. On the other hand, a surprising amount of it is really non-vital, from electric lower lumbar supports in seats to power windows and entertainment systems. If you've ever worked on car wiring, one of the amazing things is how of of the wire is there as standard spare capacity for a full option set that wasn't purchased with your model. I recently had to troubleshoot a short in the "run" circuit on my Omni after a fusable link blew (Lord, how I despise those things) and I had to open at least a half dozen bulk connectors just to narrow it down to the right area. Turned out to be a frayed wire pinched between the carb and the intake manifold, how that decides to fail one afternoon when you try to start the car is a mystery, but I'm darn glad it didn't fry while I was merging.
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