I took everyone's advice and after my control arm fiasco I stepped away from the front end for a spell to spend some time messing around the other end of the frame. Building the rear end seemed pretty straight forward, but in my well honed style, I made it much harder then it needed to be.
After lots of comparing others builds, carefully going over the various plans available out there, and generating various scribbles on my drawing pad, I came up with a vague idea what I wanted to do. It was going to work just fine too, until I saw a posting from lhsmx5 (Scott) where he built some custom pickups and used the stock Miata arms.
Well that got me thinking (always a questionable idea) that I've got this set of Miata arms just sitting here, so why shouldn't I just use them. I could save all the time and aggravation of building custom arms and some $ at the same time. So into the shop I go where I waste an entire evening building some not very trick brackets to adapt the LCA's. I rearranged the lower tube to accept these new works of art, clamped on the brackets, attached the lower arms, then stood back and admired my work. It was not impressive.
The next morning, after further reflection and a good nights sleep, I tore it all apart and went back to V1.2. Lets just put it down to momentary insanity. There was no way my cobbed together third world brackets where going to hold up, and the stock arms take up so much room under there. Even with my inferior fabrication skills, I think I can do better.
So here's a few pics of the progress I finally made. The last one (shot earlier in the day before all the bracing tubes where in place) has the diff located with the outputs lined up with the drive line (2.75" behind the front-top of the rear bulkhead). Seems like the input is kind of far fwd, but I'll deal with that later.
Also, as I was about to turn the lights off for the evening, I realized that I boxed in the space usually reserved for the gas tank on an IRS frame, and the space against the rear panel where a solid axle tank goes is only 7" deep. Hmmm, where am I going to put the tank? Guess I better move a brace or 2 to open up that space above the diff.
Next up is bending some tubes for the rear hoops. I'm planning on doing a little home bending with wood, heat, and leverage. Should be a fun experiment as well as an opportunity to burn down the garage.
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