StanceWorks: REVIVAL! 800hp 1931 Ford Race Truck Gets a New Chassis

StanceWorks Video Transcript

Maybe it’s surprising or maybe it’s not i don’t know you tell me but it’s been seven entire months since we last worked on the model a and if you weren’t here for that build we put a lot of effort into getting the model 8 back on the

Road for the first time in a long time after did a whole bunch of sitting we got it running we got a lot of kinks sorted out only for this guy to crash it on one of the very first test drives my steering linkage separated and left me

With no input at the steering wheel and it was one of the scariest things to ever happen to me i’ve been preoccupied with the ferrari lately but now that we’re waiting on some parts i feel like i’m ready to jump back on the horse and

I want to get this thing back on the road i want to make some improvements i want to make it safer than it’s ever been and i’m excited to drive it once more so let’s pick up where we left off seven months ago and start working on this chassis

Most of you guys are familiar with the model a but this channel has done quite a bit of growing since the last time we tinkered with it so i want to give a quick crash course of what we’ve accomplished and where we left off most recently we had finished up an

Engine swap in the model a only to find out that the crate engine we bought from a ford dealership had been tampered with and reassembled incorrectly it took a lot of work and a lot of time before we finally figured out what exactly was wrong with the engine but

Eventually we did get it solved and got the truck running and driving it was prepped ahead to the dyno but on a test drive my steering linkage let go and i crunched the front end of the hot rod if you want the full story and want to experience the build from beginning to

End i’ve got a playlist of the episodes linked in the description after the wreck i cut the chassis off of the model a from the firewall forward the damage was certainly salvageable and not much was very bent but i saw an opportunity to make some changes and improvements that we’re going to discuss

Later in the episode thankfully i had designed my chassis in cad and still have all of the original files so we went into fusion 360 made some updates and revisions and in the most recent episode welded together all the bits and bobs to fabricate a new front end

Taking a lot of care to make sure everything was true plum and square we got the frame rails welded together and all of the accessories tacked to them i anticipated that we’d continue down this path and get this truck complete in short order but that is where we stopped and over

The last seven months this chassis setup has been sitting on the workbench so let’s kick off the rust unfortunately this is what happens to raw metal that’s stored in the shop because we are so close to the ocean we’re only about a mile away so the air is humid and salty even inside

But thankfully it’s all just surface rust and it should be pretty easy to remove but instead of using sandpaper or a scotch brite pad we’re going to use a better tool instead i’ve got this abrasive pad for my angle grinder that should make very quick work of this surface rust

On the upside this disc isn’t going to remove any material it can’t mar the surface or leave any gouges in the finish but the downside is this disc isn’t very resilient it’s probably only going to last long enough to do this one project but really that’s all we need i just

Need this thing clean enough to work with and tig weld on and as you guys know tig welding demands the utmost cleanliness after getting everything cleaned up i then gave everything a wipe down with some acetone to make sure all of the oils and contaminants are removed from the surface

And then it was time to burn everything in i’m starting with the brackets the mounts that will hold things like our control arms and our h r coilovers with those in place it’s important for me to make sure that everything is still straight and square

I do have the frame rails welded to the crossmember but i haven’t welded around the perimeter and i think that’s where we’re going to see a serious error introduced if we’re not careful but thankfully everything looks good so it’s time to continue welding and get this thing transformed into one big piece

Now i’ll sheepishly say if you’re enjoying this content leave a like or subscribe if you haven’t and you want to see this model a back on the road a simple click goes a long way towards supporting me and the work i put into these videos i’ve seen in a bunch of instagram

Welding videos welders using supports they’ve clamped to their weld pieces in order to get a better welding angle and i know that sounds obvious on the surface but this is my first time trying it and i’m happy that i did it this made a huge difference in the weld quality i

Was able to accomplish and i’m really happy with the outcome on a weld i would have struggled with otherwise this welding project turned out really well but it wasn’t without a couple of drawbacks as you can see there’s a lot of welding on the outside of these tubes

And almost none on the inside i probably should have clamped something in here to prevent some warpage but i didn’t and so as a result we need to account for a couple of 30 seconds worth of distortion some heat should do the trick so we’re gonna bust out the torch and get this

Metal hot if we heat up the inside of the chassis and then cool it down appropriately we can get it to shrink back into place i’m just kidding this will not work i took this over to brett’s place we used his oxy acetylene torch we got it all squared up lined up everything

Looks really good and it’s critical that all this stuff is straight our suspension geometry depends on it and i want to make sure it looks good after all we’re replacing the front of this chassis because it’s very minorly bent let’s make sure this stuff is right all right on to the next pieces

Next on the list is the front lower control arm mounts and because these are separate pieces and are divorced side to side i spent a lot of time making sure they were square to what we’ve already assembled it really wouldn’t affect much if they weren’t perfect but with all of the

Effort we’re putting into this i want them as close to perfect as possible with everything trued up it’s time to tack them into place i’ve learned my lesson on previous projects i’m not going to fully weld these until i know everything we’re adding from this point

Forward is going to work and seeing as we have a lot of stuff to figure out when it comes to steering we’re gonna take our time [Applause] on that note it’s time to dig out the old chassis that we cut off because we need to recover the steering rack so we

Can mock it up underneath the new chassis this is a woodward quick ratio manual rack and thankfully it was undamaged in the accident i wouldn’t want to have to buy a new one because this thing was not cheap The steering rack looks good in its new home but there’s a lot more to this than just kind of tossing it into place there’s a lot of changes that may or may not be obvious on this chassis versus the old one so let’s talk a little bit about what we’re doing

Now heads up real quick i’m gonna help you out i’m gonna do you a favor you may not have noticed that if you look in the timeline below there are chapter markers and that means you can skip ahead to whatever else you want to see instead of leaving a comment like

I wish you would talk less and work more this channel would be so much better but it’s too much talking don’t cry you can dry your eyes with this there’s nothing wrong with sitting at the kid’s table we’ll come grab you in a second but the adults are going to

Talk about suspension geometry why i’m moving the steering rack forward and what i’m aiming to accomplish what improvements i’m trying to make on this chassis over the old one because we could have just rebuilt it or modified the old one but i see this as a chance

To learn and improve and that’s what i’m here to do and i know some of you guys are too so let’s dive into it what we’re aiming to solve on the model a is bump steer and i illustrated this on an episode of the ferrari build a

While back but in short it’s when adverse steering effects are introduced as the wheel articulates through its range of motion you can see as i jack the wheel or in this case the brake rotor up on the ferrari it bumps steers to a toe out position

The model a has some massive bumps to your problems but because we’re redoing the front of the chassis it gives us an opportunity to solve these problems and make this vehicle perform better now on this chassis we have relocated the front lower control arm mounts they used to be located roughly where the

Steering rack is located now but this time around we have divorced them so that we have room for the fans we’re going to triangulate them into the chassis behind the steering rack and all of this is an effort to move these mounts forward because the steering rack previously was too far back

As you can see we’ve got the steering rack located quite a bit further forward than it was on the previous chassis this one here you can see just how much closer the frame rails are but why are we moving the steering rack forward to account for bump steer when

Typically it’s the up and down position that you need to account for normally the up and down position of your steering rack or tie rod ends are what define your bumpsteer characteristics and that makes sense because when you raise and lower your car all the geometry kind of changes and

You usually want to adjust in the up and down direction i mentioned in a previous episode that i wanted to move the steering rack forward and a lot of people reached out and said hey that’s not how you fix bump steer and you are correct when everything else is correct but i

Got the steering rack position wrong the tie rods or the steering links aimed very far forward and let me show you what that actually causes if this were a normal vehicle the tie rod would point straight out to the steering arm and as it traveled through the

Suspension it would move directly up and down and if you have all of your stuff lined up it does not induce any bump steer it travels with the suspension properly now the problem that we had is that in order to grab our steering arm our tie rod had to point extremely far

Forward like this now if it’s not at the end of its ball joint that’s okay it can still travel directly up and down in the right geometry but if you’re at the limit of it like this well the problem is is that this pivots on a ball socket on the inside

That’s the limit of the travel there if we’re at the limit here forwards and we want to travel up it’s going to travel on an arc it’s going to pull the wheel in or out as it travels and that’s what we were having i didn’t have the steering rack far enough

Forward i had too much angle on my tie rod and so as it bumped it was causing bump steer by traveling on an arc see how it’s moving on a diagonal not straight up and down because it has to i’m trying to move it up and down

But that ball on the inside is causing it to move in an arc if it’s at its limit so we’re going to rectify that by moving the steering rack forwards and then we will also adjust the vertical height we’re going to move the steering rack up

And down fine tune it and then we will also make some bumps to your adjusters for the outside so we can fine tune it out here and get rid of all of the bump steer that may not have made sense i’m trying my hardest i’m not a teacher

But essentially that tie rod end is a ball socket and it rotates but it has a maximum amount of travel we were at the limit of the travel therefore it was traveling on an arc instead of straight up and down we’re going to get rid of that

Now let’s figure out how we’re actually going to mount this steering rack so we know where we want the steering rack to be but we need a bit of adjustability built in after all we do want to fine tune this and eliminate all bump steer if we can the only problem is

Anybody who’s used one of these woodward racing racks can attest they are annoyingly frustrating it to mount they have a single bolt on each side and it’s part of a cast aluminum boss that’s integrated into the rack itself the flat part of the mounting surface isn’t the lowest point which requires

Usually some sort of spindly or offset mount to hold onto this thing and overall it’s just kind of annoying for the sake of supporting this rack and for triangulating those front control arm mounts i want to add some tube work to this thing which means we’ve got to

Get out the old faithful our tube notcher using a two inch hole saw we can easily cope the end of a tube to match the shape and contour of the end of our lower control arm mount with a proper miter cut on the other end this tube should just drop into place so

Making these should be very straightforward and easy i thought i’d have a really cool time lapse of the entire process from overhead but my memory card filled up after just a couple of minutes so unfortunately we just skipped straight forward to the finished result these one and a half inch dom tubes

Should do a ton for adding structure and support to these lower control arm mounts and they should help the front of this chassis to keep from twisting as we load this thing up in the turns and twisties on top of that we can design some mounts

That attach to these tubes so that we can support the steering rack effectively these mounts need to be really rigid or otherwise the steering rack will move side to side as we introduce forces as we try to transmit power to the road thankfully with our tubes tacked into

Place everything clears just as it should we’ve got plenty of room to move the steering rack up and down to fine-tune our bump steer and it looks far enough forward that we should solve all of the issues we had from our previous setup on top of designing mounts for this

Thing we need to start planning out how we’re going to attach it to the chassis that we cut on the model a but i’ve got some ideas that we’ll tackle in the next episode we will unfortunately for some of you have to build some new control arms for

This thing as well although i feel pretty confident we can get that tackled at this point we’ve got to repair a header one valve cover and a few other small details but before long we’re going to be back on the ground and rolling honestly i think that’s a pretty good

Place to cap the episode i’ll say if you enjoyed this one leave a like or subscribe if you haven’t yet we probably only have a few episodes worth of work to get this model a put back together on the road driving and we can take it over

To animal auto and get it on the dyno which i am really excited about and of course if you guys have questions about the build leave a comment let me know i’ll try to answer them at the end of the next episode that we do on this

Thing i hope you guys enjoyed this one it feels like a ton of progress to me i’m feeling pretty good i’m excited seeing what we have accomplished on the table i feel good about our solutions i think we’re going to fix the problems that we had with this thing before it’s

All about improving everywhere we can learning as we go i’m stoked i hope you guys enjoyed this one this one was fun i had fun finally getting some real fabrication in for once anyways that’s all i’ve got i’ll catch you guys at the end of the week thank

You as always for the support You