Parts! A series
I guess this question is for the ladies (who am I kidding? … meh, whatever): Have you ever had one of those memorable moments when you’re walking along and you trip or stumble, your books scatter all around .. and then as you’re getting up there’s this stranger who stops and helps you, gathering up the pile of books and awkwardly handing them to you … one … at … a …time, and his eyes meet yours in a friendly, warmhearted gaze that makes you want to run and call the police?
Well today folks, I am that guy.
In the interest of crafting a diversion from the lack of recent progress reports (I planned out the heater core design this past weekend, but thanks to a problem with my camera I lost the few pictures I took), I’m kicking off a new series of posts, where like those books I’ll creepily introduce you to a new part nearly every day. In fact I’m calling it A Part Nearly Every Day or So, to the Extent That I Am Reliable. These will be parts I already have acquired at this point, but instead of just photographing them all and putting them in the gallery, I’ll milk this for all it’s worth over a period of a week or two. The disturbing grin you’ll just have to imagine.
Some parts will be familiar, some you may not have seen before. To make the process as frustrating as possible, I’ll start off with something pretty basic — in fact, something already pictured elsewhere on this site.
Yes, it’s a driveshaft yoke. The thing that normally fits on the back of a transmission, connecting its output through a universal joint to the driveshaft which then extends back to the differential. I’ll be fitting this yoke to an electric motor instead of a transmission, but the function is the same.
Still, it’s not just your basic yoke — it’s the largest one we could find. I had been planning on milling the motor shaft to a spline format commonly known as the GM “turbo 400” after the Turbo-Hydramatic 400 transmission which introduced it. This was the largest spline I happened to be aware of in common use with hotrods, as I wanted to make the output shaft diameter as large as possible. Before he started the milling operation however, Keith the “Dutchman” called and told me he’d been looking around and had found this one, so we could make that shaft spline even larger. Awesome.
Sometimes I imagine I may end up destroying the truck, melting everything down into a pool of slag in a blinding flash of plasma or crushing it into an unrecognizeable tangle against a wall or a tree… but were the worst to happen, somehow that motor shaft is going to be sitting, gleaming amongst the destruction, with nary a scratch. This yoke will probably be lying nearby, with maybe a little ash to wipe off.