Lot's of stuff today, actually car parts not just drawings and theory. To start off though another picture, I added a silhouette of a person roughly my size beside the car for scale to the MS Paint deal from last night. I do think adding that in for scale makes the car look better.
I named him Antoine and gave him a back story too if anyone is interested.
The plan today was to go in and cut the Wagoneer brackets off the axle tubes and disassemble the transfer case to make sure what I'm planning will work the way I'm thinking it will.
Plasma cutter, what an amazing tool. Spring mounts were easy to cut off the tubes, then just have to grind/sand the remainder off. The old shock mount is the bit to the right of the obviously torched bit, it proved more stubborn and is flush to the tube so no plasma cutter with it.
My son sanding the left overs from the spring perches, he doesn't like having his picture taken and I surprised him. I told him Thursday night he was going to go and help me today, but he had an opportunity to take off and spend the night with a friend last night and didn't take it. I was expecting him to find a way out but he actually purposely stayed to help which is fantastic. Spent about six hours outside the house today working and going to lunch together and he never complained about it so maybe he's growing up.
While he was working on the axle tubes I took the transfer case off the transmission. This bit here proves my theory for the ease of bypassing the transfer case. The main input gear for the transfer case is actually a part of the transmission and uses all it's support bearings so there is no having to create bearing races or anything when making the bypass housing. You can also see the dog gear that locks the input and output shafts together.
Input side of the transfer case. The transmission and transfer case actually share gear oil with this setup, there is no sealed output shaft from the trans or input shaft from the transfer case. Old school way of doing things, but super effective for me now.
The output housing and shaft, comes complete with the vent for the transfer case handily enough. Also houses the speedometer driven gear, though I have no use for one of those. Big wide driven gear, the cut shows the dog engagement with the transfer case in 1:1, then the slider would move and cover the wide teeth with it in 2.06:1 low range. The nice thing there is that now unused wide section of teeth is a beautiful place to tack weld the shift collar so that it stays locked in 1:1.
All that was left was to grab this little bugger and throw the rest of the transfer case away, the shift collar. It was as easy as taking the bottom cover off, pulling the intermediate shaft and intermediate shaft gears out through that hole and then the shift collar will pop out. At least that's how it's supposed to work. I had to use a pry bar.....and then a hammer.......and then a slide hammer to get the intermediate shaft out of the transfer case housing. Jordan ended up having to hold the transfer case because even with the slide hammer shocking the shaft it was still just pulling the whole deal across the bench.
Did I say simple matter? I mean a simple matter of using the plasma cutter to cut a hole in the case big enough to get the shift collar out because nothing I was doing was causing that intermediate shaft to budge. A soothing dose of fire fixes everything though.
There is the stuff lined up to the back of the transmission now. Need to cut a flange plate to mate up to the transmission, I ordered a transfer case gasket set this evening to be able to use as a pattern for that. Then we've got a 5 1/2 inch ID piece of thick wall steel tubing I can procure and use for the body of the thing, then just weld another piece of steel to the back side to be able to bolt the output housing to. The wrench in that plan at the moment is the low range gear is bigger than the hole for that output housing, but not needed the gear I should be able to cut it away from the needed part of the collar.
Having got that bit sorted I went and helped Jordan on the axle. We got all the mounts cut off and went to town trying to get some of the rust off. After a bit of that I figured I'd kept the boy away from his friends long enough so I sprayed it down with some phosphoric acid to further attack the rust and we headed on our way.