I’ve just finished up a major sub-system on our Project Unfair: our floating rear axle setup. It’s all about fixing the phenomenon of “knock back” , where the pedal goes to the floor after hard cornering due to rear axle deflection pushing the brake pads away from the rotor. Our Unfair solution is to use a circle-track full floating axle setup where the axle is de-coupled from the wheel hub and the rotor. Using some custom machined parts, I’ve hooked up Wilwood’s 14″ rear brake setup with a Moser GN floater. I still have some work for a parking brake, but this setup will completely prevent any knock back issues.

I’m working on getting the human interfaces fabricated on Project Unfair and I just finished mocking up the column connection to the steering servo. Wilwood pedals are coming next, or possibly mounting the seat. The neat thing about this steering shaft is that my original design used 4 U-joints with the steering shaft under the motor mount, but Tim Christ at Coast Chassis Design (the gods of 10.5 racing over in Daytona Beach) convinced me to look into rotating the rack so the servo pointed above the motor mount.

So I did, and here’s the result. A very clean 2 U-joint steering mechanism. Good stuff. This photo is of the mockup with steel U-joints… we have ultra-cool aluminum versions from Borgeson on the way.

I’ve been hard at work for the past several weeks building headers and exhaust for our Unfair Camaro Project. I worked with Rich Craig over at Cone Engineering to get all the materials except for the oval stainless tube. The oval tube came from Burns Stainless. This is the fifth set of headers I’ve built from scratch, and I learn something new every time. These are my best effort yet. It is such a pleasure working with high quality materials. Anyway the header fabrication will be a full-fledged Super Chevy in the Project Unfair series. Look for it soon on a newsstand near you.

The oval tube is another matter.

Unfair is so low, that the only way to get enough exhaust for 800-1400 hp (depending on mode) under the car is to use oval tube. It’s high quality stuff, but there is a lot of stress in the material from all the machine work done on it. When you cut into the middle of a mandrel-bent oval tube, the tube tries to become round again. It takes a *lot* of work to get it ovalized again to weld it. The end result looks good, but the squeezing, clamping, and tack-welding to weld it to another oval tube is a lot more effort than ordinary round tube.

After this, I’ll be making custom mufflers using one of Cone’s kits.

I spent most of a day this past weekend making a cool, nice-looking transmission crossmember for our Unfair Camaro project. Unfortunately, it sucked. To be more specific, it flexed downward 3/16″ when the weight of the transmission was placed on it. I made it out of high-grade 4130 rectangular tube, with proper welding and great fitment. It looks really good. But, as I said, it sucked.

I was lamenting this state of affairs to my friend John (a materials/mechanical engineer with a military firm) when he asked me why I was stuck on using an OEM based design with the insulating material (rubber or polyurethane) in the original place. Why not, he asked, move that material to the body side of the crossmember and get it away from the transmission itself? I thought about that for awhile and then John called back with a comment from another engineer friend of ours, Glenn, who said that the span of my original crossmember was a big problem too. I needed to make the crossmember shorter, which will minimize deflection a lot. Making the crossmember shorter meant I had to move the body interface from the subframe frame rail to the floor.

A bit of luck was with me: the location of the subframe reinforcement rib was welded to the floor at just the right location. I could weld tabs directly to the floor and they would be incorporated in the same structure used to bolt the subframe to the car. Perfect. So I made another crossmember, this time using a pair of poly rod ends (from AME) I had originally bought for II Much but hadn’t used. Putting the insulating material outboard of the transmission itself makes the whole setup more compact, with a big bonus of giving me more floor space for the humongous exhaust to come.

Here’s the new crossmember. It bolts directly to the transmission and save space and weight compared to the original design. I used spacers between the rod end and the body tabs to give us some fudge room when we put the real transmission in.