Update

 

Pile of parts that I made over the weekend. I had a birthday party to go to late afternoon on Saturday - nothing like a 50th birthday party for your baby boy to make you feel old. Super proud of him, however. Good father and husband, talented musician and craftsman. Nice party - got to see a couple of former neighbors, as well as some of the guys he grew up with that spent time at the house when they were young. All of them turned out well, too. 

Before going to the party, I welded the safety chains, stake pockets and a gusset on the torque arm on the trailer project. I was going to weld two stake pockets on the back, that's them on the right side of the photo, but if you were going to load up a four-wheeler, the stake pockets would be in the way. I think the plan now will be bolt a couple of angles to the side boards with a gap between them slightly larger than the plywood for the tail gate. That way I can just slide the wood in and be done with it. Maybe add a stiffener to the top and bottom edge.

The aluminum angles in the foreground will be the stakes for the front of the trailer. I'll weld a stop on them to keep them at the right height in the pockets and some flat that I can bolt the wood to.

Behind the angles are a pair of aluminum spacers for the fender mounting. The fender brackets have an edge bent down, like a channel with shallow legs. That creates a gap between the fender and the flat surface of the bracket. The spacers will take up the gap, rather than distorting the top of the fenders.

Behind the flat spacers are four round spacers for mounting the shocks. I ordered the necessary bolts for mounting the shocks along with some extra stuff to replenish my hardware inventory. In the meantime, I made up a quickie bolt with some redi-rod so I could get my dimension. I'll be ready to mount the shocks as soon as the hardware comes in later this week.

Back left are the pipe couplings I'm going to use for the faux axle on the jitney project. I bored the threads out of the inside so they're a loose fit on the pipe I'll be using until the real thing comes along. The coupling on the right will thread onto the pipe axle and get welded to the wheel flange. That one has three setscrews, so when I get it screwed onto the pipe, I can snug them down and keep the wheel from coming off the car if I roll it around. 

Here's the setup for welding the threads back on the pipe. With the gap in between the two angles, I can easily put three tack welds on the joint while it's clamped in alignment. By tacking it in a minimum of three places, I stand a pretty good chance of decent alignment after it's finished welded.

And here it is after it was welded. You'll notice a little crater dead center in the photo. Normally, when welding pipe, you always want to overlap your starts and stops and depending, grind your tacks so you'll get a complete root weld all around the inside of the joint. If this was going to be put into service with pressure behind it, I would have put another pass over the top, again making sure all my starts and stops were staggered in between the starts and stops of the root pass, since that's usually where a leak will come from. Since the pipe will have to slip through the couplings later on, no point building up the weld, however, just to have to grind it back down again.

I need to drill the holes in the flange plates and get them cut out and welded onto one end of the pipe and the coupling. I've got a dentist appointment today and the weather is turning cold. I need to do a bit of cleaning in the shop to get it set up for heat, and I've got other things that need to be done prior to winter's arrival. Hope to start this week making brackets for the radius rods.