Eating the elephant.
As the old cliche goes, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
The same sentiment goes for building an off-road trailer. I was tied up taking care of some domestic repairs for most of the evening, but I still managed to slip out to the shed for an hour or so. The frame is at a point where I need to have the trailing arms built before I can do any more on the frame. So the focus was turned to the trailing arms tonight.
Now one of the tricks, in my opinion, to building the independent trailing arms is getting them built as close to identical to each other as possible. I've been considering a build like this for quite some time to be honest. So, a few years ago when I designed a small fabrication table I built in a few features that would help with a project such as this. The table top was laser cut out of 1/2" thick steel plate and had rectangular slots cut into the table to accept 1/2" T-nuts.
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Usually I put the T-nuts on the underside and use them to clamp an item into position. In this case I put the T-nuts on top of the table and bolted them into place. This gives me a hard stop to locate the straight tube of the trailing arm against. It also ensures me that the tube is parallel to the front of the table and perpendicular to the right end of the table as well.
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Just a couple pictures to show how tightly the T-nuts fit into the ends of the slots cut into the table top.
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So what does this all become? Well, in the absence of a true fixture table, it becomes the second best thing. Both of the main tubes of the trailing arm are indexed off of the short side of the table. The straight tube is held against the T-nut stops. I cut a couple spacer blocks to go between the two main tubes to maintain them parallel to each other. And it's all held together by a handful of quick clamps. I didn't have a clamp long enough to span the two tubes with the spacer blocks between them, so I used a C-clamp in the center to link two of the clamps together. Sometimes you just have to find a way to make things work. The intention is to put together a procedure that will be repeatable for the second trailing arm.
So far I think I'm on track.
Mike