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While Chris and Tony were busy fixturing and welding the subassemblies together, and the body shop was prepping and painting the shell, we were busy here in Colorado machining our bits and pieces of the puzzle, and amassing nuts, bolts, miscellaneous hardware and fittings. Here at Polystrand, just outside of Denver, we have a pretty good selection of manual machine tools, but our facility over on the other side of the Rocky Mountains, Gordon Composites, has a kick-ass shop, with some really nice CNC equipment. It’s nice to be able to send a CAD model via email, and have a stack of parts come back a week later! Of course, there were a few last minute things we forgot , which left me with no option but to go old school with the mill and the lathe here at Polystrand.
Remember how I mentioned that in order to get this all done on time, we needed to spread the workload over a few different vendors as well as handle a portion of it ourselves? Some of the small parts that needed machining were in such small volume that it was quickest to just cut them manually. These pieces are the rod-end mounts for the composite upper arms.
We couldn’t find eccentric bolts (cam bolts) in the proper length and diameter for our project, so we had to make those as well.
Same thing with some of the rod-end mounts for the suspension links. While we used some off-the-shelf threaded bungs, some of what we needed were an odd size, so we spun those up on the lathe.
