Now that I'm in the home stretch on the mounting of the powerplant on the Ranger frame, there's the matter of making a transmission crossmember to secure the back of the rig. At first I was going to source some angle iron with which to use to make a crossmember but then I thought about looking in the scrap pile of auto parts to see if there may be something that I could use to make a crossmember. I gambled on the hope that I could find an old crossmember from another vehicle that I stripped and I was successful in that field. Looking at the pile of parts from the minivan, I ran across its old crossmember. While this piece is way too big to use in its original form on the narrow Ranger frame, that doesn't mean that I can't cut and trim and weld to make a crossmember. On the minivan crossmember there are two mounting tabs on the piece that are spaced at some weird positions. In its original state, this piece is absolutely useless on the Ranger frame with a SBF V8 powerplant on board. First thing I had to do was cut those two tabs from the crossmember. The transmission mount on the C4 incorporate two studs that secure it to the mounting base on the car it would've been used on. My plan ended up being me taking the two tabs I cut from the minivan crossmember, trimming one end of each piece, then butting the two pieces together, side by side, and welding it up. After I cut a wing off each side of the two tabs, I mounted the tabs on top of the studs on the C4 mount, then started welding the two pieces together. Once the two pieces were welded together, I was able to remove the new base piece and move on to welding it to the base crossmember. With the transmission mount base done I had to figure out how to make the base crossmember fit in our new configuration. The solution I had to that was to cut the outer thirds of the piece off, leaving the center tube piece. I then wend on a tangent and welded the mount base to the center tube, with the intent of being able to hang the tube under the transmission in order to gauge where the two end pieces would have to go. Because of the way this crossmember is made, when I trim down the end pieces to be able to mate them to the ends of the center piece, things will not perfectly mate up. I'll be able to weld things up either way, but in the end, the whole works is going to look pretty tacky, all things considered. Of course, with projects like this, tacky is pretty much a norm, especially when there isn't even any aftermarket hardware available for this level of customization. I could utilize shop equipment like tubing benders to bend tubes to make a crossmember, but we don't have that luxury. Hell, I'm building the car in the middle of a gravel covered driveway so yeah, tacky is going to be the word of the day here. I took a jack and put my wood block on it to jack up the transmission a smidge to get a better angle, relative to the rear end, then trimmed the end pieces to be able to mate them to the ends of the center piece. I'll weld these together next and drill the holes on the frame to add the bolts to hold all this garbage together. Once I remove the jack, the transmission will be completely suspended on the crossmember. I'll finish things up by welding the motor mount brackets as I stated I would do previously in order to finish up the whole powertrain mounting phase of the project.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
May 2023
|