StanceWorks Video Transcript

Foreign But I think it has been way too long since we had a control arm building Saga here on the channel so good news we’ve got four of these bad boys to build today we are finally diving back into my 1931 Ford Model A project we’ve got to

Rebuild the entire front end of this thing so for the roughly I don’t know 100 000 or so subscribers that have joined since the last time we actually worked on this thing here’s a quick recap as evidenced by everything piled on top of it it’s been a long time since I’ve

Worked on the model A it’s been over a year and a half since our last meaningful episode and given the growth of the channel I’m assuming half of you guys aren’t even familiar with this project so for those that aren’t here it is this is my 1931 Ford Model A closed cab pickup

Now if you look back there are some really early stanceworks videos about this truck but I reintroduced it in October of 2021 where it sat without an engine thanks to Melting a ring land on cylinder 8 thanks to too much boost now the previous engine never returned

From the engine builder so in its place we bought a crate engine built specifically for supercharging and it should have been much better suited for the project we paired that with an all-new installation of a haltech elite 2500 Standalone system and eventually got it up and running a few weeks later But the sense of victory was short-lived because we found out that our supposedly new engine was not so new it had been disassembled and reassembled incorrectly at a Ford dealership and then sold to me but after re-timing the engine and following a tune-up from Andrew Molina

At animal Auto we got the car running and driving the way that it should but this project has fought tooth and nail every step of the way so that success was short-lived too because during a test drive my steering linkage came apart resulting in a bit of a

Fender bender if it had fenders now the damage was admittedly pretty minimal but I’m not one to turn down any opportunity to make my projects better so I fired up Fusion 360 and redesigned all of the front suspension in order to eliminate some bumps to your characteristics the truck was exhibiting

In the past from this point on it was a process of slowly chipping away at cutting apart the truck and building a new chassis on the workbench across a number of episodes we made some really good progress but somewhere along the line I lost a bit of motivation and

Then the model A just sat exactly like this for months and months and months but that brings us to today because I’m finally feeling some motivation with the Ferrari on the other side of the world to put this thing back on the street and so that’s where we pick up literally

By picking up CAD templates for our new control arms now if you’re new around here control arms and I have a bit of a special relationship I built more than my fair share of them striving for Perfection when it comes to our Ferrari 308 project but this time around it’s an active

Necessity because her control arms were bent in our fender bender and were making some changes to the geometry itself however we do need to rescue and reuse the ball joint cups from our old control arms we had these parts custom machined by Brett Walker across the street for

The model A and given that I don’t want to go through that process again we might as well just cut the old ones up given that they’re trash already the rest of our parts however will be brand new including the ball joints themselves given that they were trashed during the removal process The rescue process is far from a glamorous one we’re just going to run our old Parts through a dying bandsaw blade saving only what we need following that comes the cleanup process because we’ve got tube ends and weld that we need to remove from these ball joint housings I’ve had a number of opportunities to put this Disc Sander to work but this is by far the best use yet it made immediate work of the welds left on these things From here it’s a game of precision but it’s Precision by any means necessary I never said that it had to be glamorous the effort at hand is to Simply clamp all of our parts to our accurate CAD printed template as long as everything is at the correct

Angle and in the correct position the tubes that connect these parts aren’t hugely consequential because of that we don’t need to build a complicated jig and instead we can confirm our new control arms are correct by matching them both to the template and to some of the undamaged old parts Now for those that like the nerdy details we’re using all 5 8 18 heim joints and one inch 120 wall Dom tubing for both the upper and lower control arms by virtue of the joints that we’re using if the upper control arms are symmetric side to side so those can be built at

The same time the lower control arms though are offset in order to achieve the correct Caster angle given that the lower ball joint needs to cant inwards for the correct kpi or Kingpin inclination angle they can’t be built identically now plenty of you guys are probably wondering Mike how do you know this

Stuff and the answer is I’ve spent way more time than I’d like to admit reading books forums and using a number of suspension calculators I’m not a professional and I’d never claim to know everything but there are at least a handful of basic rules you can apply to

Any double Wishbone suspension we proved that it worked on the Ferrari and thankfully we can confirm it here foreign That we’re TIG welding everything we want as tight of a fit up as we can achieve I’m giving it my best eyeball shot but thankfully we’ve got Chloe watching over as well to make sure the Quality Control process is on point after a full day of perfecting tube

Fitment on all four control arms we’re finally ready to start sticking stuff together before we put it on the car for a test fit All right If I’m honest I have a terrible habit of fully welding Parts before I check and make sure that they fit but thankfully I was patient and with a handful of tack welds we got everything bolted to the chassis and confirmed we nailed it now some of you may remember the goal of

Our suspension redesign was to fix some bump steer characteristics and while I don’t demonstrate it here trust me when I say it looks better than ever before and I think the model A is going to drive its best yet but how we’re accomplishing that bump steer fix is by repositioning the

Steering rack which means we’ve got to get the steering rack mounted to the subframe now for better or worse and emphasis on worse to be clear Woodward steering has some frustratingly designed mounts on their racks now I’m sure there’s some logic behind it but I’ve yet to be able

To figure it out and thus as a result we’ve got to build some weird ways to mount it now these bevel cut tubes will allow us to bolt the rack to the chassis and bolt these mounts down to the table so everything is fixed and square

It’s a weird way to accomplish it but it’s the best way I could conjure up especially given the way that I did this previously which was much less elegant now given how we built the rest of this chassis it would have been nice to have some laser cut parts from senka send but

I knew that this one was going to have to be done the old-fashioned way I don’t have a 3D scan of these parts and I’d have to mock it up and get it perfectly centered on the table itself so each side is slightly different but that’s part of the design

It’s part of what makes the Woodward rack kind of bizarre it’s asymmetric but that won’t slow us down we’ve got some nice sheet metal mounts and our two bungs in place and it’s just a matter of burning it all together so that we can cross this off the list The finished result is looking decent and I’m a lot happier with this Frame than I am with the original one not only does it look better but it’s a lot more rigid as well as having better geometry serviceability and it has room at the front for components like the

Heat exchanger and the fans the big question now is does it have room for our new oil pan without exact dimensions of this thing before buying it I took a guess that it would fit the idea is to make it clear with about this much room now we’re making the swap because we

Need that clearance due to the new design but we’re gonna gain the added benefit of increased oil capacity and more importantly internal baffling around the sump which will help with oil starvation and cavitation should this thing ever see some serious g-forces the only thing to note is we need to

Install this pan before we weld the chassis into place it is possible to change the pan after the fact but it’s not going to be easy because it requires pulling the engine some might consider this a designer engineering flaw but I call it a packaging constraint given how small we

Want the wheelbase of the truck to be how low we want the engine to sit and how we want to have no front overhang in front of the wheels Now as with any engine that has a block and timing cover service that meet it’s always a good idea to add some sealant-like RTD or durco on those joints even if you’re using a brand new gasket on the note of new gaskets our coyote gasket happens to include the windage

Tray built into it it’s something I’ve never seen before but I thought it was pretty cool and so I’m pointing it out so you guys can take note as well as one might anticipate the pan fit up perfectly and it looks like we’re gonna have the clearance we’re looking for

Just a matter of lifting our new chassis up into place for confirmation Due to being held by a Hoist the engine sitting at a slightly upward angle but with everything in place it’s looking good we’ll need to lower the engine down into its final resting place but to do that we’re going to need to build some engine mounts

Without any 3 16 material on hand I’m going to cannibalize some Ferrari mounts that we didn’t use during the project so we can get these built quickly and effectively the Ford Coyote is not known for being a light engine there’s a lot of weight involved with a

Dual overhead cam V8 and it tips the scales at a staggering 445 pounds not to mention the extra minimum 100 we’ve added on top with a blower so we need some mounts that are guaranteed to hold the weight and the torque this thing’s going to put out thus the heavy duty mounts welded

Directly to the chassis Now all I get these parts welded up I’m going to take a quick second here and make note of the fact that this episode and most of my episodes aren’t sponsored by anybody it’s because I value the Integrity of my content and I don’t want to be Shilling

Out mobile phone games or vitamin supplements so instead of that if you’re looking for a way to support this Channel and this content you should head to the stanceworks patreon which gives you a behind the scenes look at all of the projects in the shop and all of the

Updates I don’t share here on top of that it gives you early access and discounts to stanceworks merchandise and most importantly it gives you access to the private channels of the stanceworks Discord so hit the link in the description if you’re looking for a way to support this content Now meanwhile I’ve made an effort to get our steering linkages built and what’s important is that this time it does not come apart so we’re going to take some extra steps to ensure that it’s also good practice to add a support or heim joint between every U-joint in

The steering shaft and due to the odd path ours has to take we’re gonna add two but that’ll come in the next episode for now let’s turn our attention to the valve covers in the accident the front grille shell was pushed back just enough to crack the passenger side which is unsurprising

Given that it’s made of plastic upon initial inspection I was worried that there would be a piece missing and lost inside the engine but after removing it it was clear that it was simply stuck to the inside and folded out of the way I think we’re set

So just like the bottom of the block we’re cleaning up the factory sealant and applying some fresh stuff before we install some new aluminum valve covers now it’s hard to justify purchasing something like this over the factory Parts but I figure if I’m going to spend several hundred dollars on Factory

Plastic ones why not upgrade things while we’re at it and give the engine a little bit more flavor from the outside in the next episode we’re definitely gonna have to tackle the fuel injectors because well I broke the Golden Rule I parked this thing with E85 in its system

And it’s been in there the entire time for those that aren’t aware E85 is incredibly corrosive so we’re gonna need to replace a lot of components but we’ll just add it to the list of making this truck better than it’s ever been before now though let’s focus on making

Progress with the parts that we have I threw some paint on the front end of the chassis because it would be impossible to paint it in place without removing the engine and that seems like juice that’s not worth the squeeze but if we leave the basis of these frame

Rails unpainted we can weld them into place and then do just a little bit of touch up after letting the paint dry for a few hours we can Bolt the steering rack into place and then we can transition back into the shop where we can turn our attention to the truck side chassis

We’ll need to do a bit of prep work before we can start welding all of our mating faces need to be at the exact correct angle we also need to make sure there’s no paint in the way because welding will contaminate our welds Now given that we’re going to lift the chassis into place for the final time there is a lot of measuring involved not only do we need to make sure that the chassis legs are the exact same length but everything needs to be level square and Plumb now maybe that sounds simple on the

Surface or maybe it doesn’t but the truth is this is hours of work summed up into only a handful of seconds of video for example we need to make sure that the truck and original chassis are sitting level and square with Earth following that we need to make sure that

Both sides of our new chassis also sit level and square now some of that comes down to the quality of work I did when I welded this thing together on the workbench but the rest of it is important here and now it’s simple to make sure that it’s level

In one axis in this case transversely down the length of the truck but once we add some tax into place to keep it from going anywhere we also need to make sure that it’s level transversely or to put it simply side to side pulling out even a tenth of a degree in

One place can make the entire thing shift so it becomes a delicate Balancing Act if we want to make sure that everything is true and straight especially given we want to make sure that the truck tracks straight down the road it’s not impossible to do all this work

Without a chassis table but it definitely takes a while longer to pull off once I was sure everything was where I wanted it I laid down some welds to make sure it would stay in place forever that means at this point there’s not a whole lot left we just need to install

All of our newly finished suspension components we need to lay down a little bit of paint lay down a few welds and redo our fuel system and then this thing should be back on the street so subscribe if you haven’t so you don’t miss the next episode and we’ll see you next week Foreign