First Blood

Okay, who had May 28 as the day that I would first injure myself on this project. You are the winner.

Things were going swimmingly. Here are the parts for the front suspension build...

First I bench assembled the upper and lower control arms. Pretty simple. Next I installed them onto the frame. It took the usual bit of filing, deburring, more filing, but they seemed to fit reasonably well. Next I had to torque them to the proper foot/pound specification. Went very well. I am sort of getting the whole hang of things. Until.....

I was only paying 95% attention to the torqueing of the last bolt and the torque wrench, which I was pulling hard towards me, slipped off of the nut and I smacked myself right in the face. Here is the bloody evidence of my stupidity.

Kind of looks like the world's worst fever blister. Actually, it is not that bad, once I cleaned it up.

Anyway, I soldiered on and finished the control arm mountings, and also drilled a couple of holes for studs onto which the car horns will eventually be mounted.


The last steps for this section are to install the ball joints, spindles, and shocks. But this will have to wait until next week as it requires a special rare socket that is shared amongst all of the Hurricane builders. One guy bought it and each subsequent builder just uses it and forwards it on to the next guy. After all that, the next step will be the steering system.

Measure twice, Torque once

I finished installing the rear end onto the frame. Twice actually. You see the first time, I was not particularly careful making sure that the rear end was nicely squared on the frame. I figured it would all just pull together in the end once everything was put in place and tightened. Nope. The right rear hub was significantly sitting outside of where the left rear was, in relation to the centerline of the car. Let's back up a bit.

The first step was to bench assemble the shock absorbers. This was fun and easy. They are nice ones, an upgrade from the standard package that Hurricane threw in for me. They are fully adjustable with a little knob at the bottom to control how soft you want the handling. Here is a picture of the kit and the finished product:



Next, I moved the rear end roughly into position in the frame, jacked it up and connected the two trailing arms and 3rd link which hold the rear end to the frame. The trailing arms control how far back the rear end sits, the 3rd link controls how high or low it sits, and a panhard bar controls how far left and right it sits. The Hurricane uses "heim joints" which are very strong. They also let you finely adjust these by short twists on the brass bars between the heim joints. Here are a couple of pictures: the first is of the heim joint holding the trailing arm, the second the panhard bar.



These are some very thick bolts. They have to be tightened to 120 foot-pounds of torque. Basically, this means you pull as hard as you can until you fart. Or you use a big torque wrench to measure this accurately. Along the way, I found that the spacers put in the mount needed to be ground down a little bit and de-burred. For this I got to use my die grinder to take off about 1/20th of an inch or so. In hindsight, it may not have been too great an idea to mount my vise in the laundry room work area since most of the sparks created by the grinding either shot towards my laundry or my gas water heater. Oh well, no fire this time.

Next I installed the shock absorbers. That went okay too, but did not fix my misalignment problem. In fact it pretty well sealed my fate, that I was going to have to undo all of this work and fix it. The shocks were at about 13 degrees difference in angle and were easily a noticeable flaw even to a naked eye. So off to Harbor Freight to buy a breaker bar, which is a huge wrench used to loosen bolts that are tightened as much as these suspension pieces were.

That chore went fairly well. I loosened one bolt on each of the links and the panhard bar, and the rear end dropped enough to move it by hand to the appropriate spot. In the end, I am within about 1/16th of an inch from the same height and distance from the frame. In other words, the rear end is now spot on. Here are some pictures of it finished.




The next step is to work on the front suspension. Two more shocks to build, and this time I had a little motherly help.

Axle problem solved !!!

This is a very happy day--I solved my rear axle problem. I ended up speaking with Lynn at John's, the company that makes the rear end stuff for Hurricane. She was absolutely delightful to deal with and managed to educate me a lot--enough to solve the problem. We quickly determined that my parts were correct, and that the problem was probably with the positraction differential. The limited slip has an extra gear in there that sometimes gets out of alignment in shipping. This made sense to me.

She gave me 2 suggestions to fix it. One involved taking apart the passenger side axle, the other required taking off the entire differential as well. Fortunately, I was able to disassemble the PS axle without too much difficulty and use it temporarily on the DS to realign the gears with the help of my big hammer. Then when I tried the correct axle back in place, it almost fit. I did just a tiny bit of grinding on the bearing housing to open it up just a miniscule amount, maybe 5 thousandths of an inch or so. I had done some measurements with a new digital caliper and determined that the outer diameter of the bearing was just too big compared to the housing it needed to go into. Hopefully, I will not have done anything that will bite me down the road with any leakage. The cheap little grinding stone I used could not have done much in the few seconds I hit the circumference.

In the end, everything went in very smoothly. It took about 75 minutes, once I was good to go. Overall, I spent almost 11 hours on what should have been a one hour job. Here is a pic showing the axle in place. You can also see the emergency brake, the whitish drum area.

Next, I put on the rotors. When you apply the brakes, this is what gets grabbed.


Then I installed the brake shoes and calipers. I ran into a little problem here as the manual just said do it. At first, I put the outer brake shoes on the wrong sides as I did not realize that there was a difference, but there was a little clip that had match up on the inner and outer pads. Figured that one out myself. Then, when I went to install the calipers, it turns out that the bolts which fasten them to the backing plates were metric! The manual never mentioned that, so I had to run to Sears to buy a 10mm socket. Then it went very smoothly.



Finally, I hit another big milestone. The first empty boxes hit the curb...

No real progress

It was not a very good week. I am still stuck on the driver side rear axle. I have not gotten much help from the forum, and I am still waiting to hear back from Hurricane on my questions about what to do about it next. After working on it for a couple of hours myself and another with Phil, I think the problem may be with the rear wheel bearing being larger than the housing it is supposed to fit into. So I bought a digital caliper to measure the diameters of the hole and the bearing.

Just taking some quickie measurements seems to bear out my hypothesis, but it is very close, probably within the margin of operator error on my part. This week I will try to be a little more precise, but I may not be able to measure everything I need to. Phil will be driving through Kansas City next weekend on his way to Wichita and has volunteered to swing by Hurricane to exchange any parts, if we can figure out exactly what is wrong.

I may also bypass this problem for a while and work a little on the front end of the car's suspension.

A Busy Week

I was able to spend a lot of time on the car this week, though it doesn't necessarily show it.

The first task was to install the brake caliper backing plates to the rear end housing. Seemed straight forward enough. However...

The plates came with two sets of bolts, neither of which would work properly. One set was already on the plates from the manufacturer, but were completely different from the install manual. The other set followed Hurricane's manual, but did not quite fit through the holes. And neither one had the correctly threaded nuts that were needed, a fine thread. In the end, after my first guidance from the other builders in the Hurricane Owners Forum, I opened up the holes a little bit and bought the right nuts at Napa.

The next step was to install the rear axles. Step one was to silicone the spacers in place and to apply some grease to the bearing. Having neither, it was off to the new Lowe's out in Arnold with a $10 coupon. Every little bit of savings helps. This was probably the high point of the week.

Back home, it was time to put the new goodies to use. I had bought some RTV silicone before in a toothpaste type tube that basically exploded the first time I tried to use it on the third member (differential) a few weeks ago. This time, I bought a bigger cylindrical tube that I can use in my caulk gun. Works much better. Too bad I have no idea how much to use. Guessing seems okay.

Next was the grease gun. I followed the directions for loading the grease tube into the gun, almost to a tee. Exactly to a tee would have been better. I neglected to tighten the screw that holds the lid down, so when I released the plunger, the grease blew right through that hole creating a giant, stinky, sloppy mess before I could re-engage the plunger in the safe position. It was almost fun to watch, just not to clean up afterwards.

From there, I got everything glued and lubed up and tried to install the axles.



No luck. The axles did not seem to fit. Ended up being another huge mess. The previous work of fitting the backing plates went by the wayside. Several hours were spent cursing and wondering if I even had the right parts. Eventually, I went to Harbor Freight to buy a bigger hammer. That seems to be a pretty good answer to a lot of problems.

Anyway, this morning, after two hours, and one broken ratchet wrench, I did manage to get the passenger side axle installed properly. Here is a picture (taken with new AA batteries, also from Lowe's)...

The driver side still is a huge problem. Just does not seem to be fitting. Here is a picture of the splined end of the axle shaft and another of the interior of the housing shaft looking at the third member.


It seems that I am about 5/8ths of an inch from getting it all the way in. I do get in far enough to engage the teeth enough to turn the axle with the drive shaft. But the bearing is not even close to being all the way into the housing. It will leak like crazy if I were to leave it like this. More pounding needs to be done, I guess. Anyway, I am going to leave it like this and take a few days off for R&R.

Working on the car again

I am working on the car again, although I am not 100%. We'll just have to see how it goes.

So today, I decided to finish up rustproofing the ring and pinion on the rear end that I had put on about a month ago. This time, I remembered to use the Metal Ready stuff to prepare the steel for the rustproofing POR15 paint. Then I went to get the remaining POR15 only to find that it was as hard as granite. In the last month or so of inactivity, it had set up in the can and no longer usable. So I had to quickly wash off all of the rust-starter that I had just applied. Doh!

Next, I did finally install the rear axle housing vent tube that had not been shipped with my original kit but came a little while ago. I also did receive the windshield wiper assembly, so now I am just waiting on the panhard bar as my last back-ordered item.

The final bit of news is that Hurricane Motorsports has indeed been sold and will stay in business. In fact, the new owner is going to keep both options available for the time being, turnkeys and complete kits. In fact, at least for a while, he is keeping the same prices. This is very good news in that the Hurricane brand will continue and that more new builders will be joining in the fun. This means more guys will be available on the forums with answers to the dumb questions I will be coming up with.

No work getting done

Sorry folks, nothing to report. No work has gotten done as I am still suffering from the strained neck and arm. The physical therapist is pretty certain I did it when on my back painting the underside of the car with the rust proofing. Oh well. Probably just going to rest most of this coming week, finish my taxes and bowling league secretary duties, then go to San Diego for a vacation with Sue. So the car building will remain mostly idle.

On a very sad note, Oscar Cuniberti Canavan died this past week at 17. The son of a very dear estranged friend, he was a sweet kid who was enthusiastic about this car when we last chatted about it. I had really hoped he might be able to help me with the build this summer when he got back to St. Louis.