I got my balljoint cups in from Spohn.

 

I decided to take another look at a rectangular tubing LCA. Both of these are made from 3 main parts.

This design is made from 2.5" x 1.5" tubing.




Here is a 3" x 1.5" design.

 

Well after waiting 10 days for Ballistic Fab to actually ship the bungs, they sent me the wrong ones.

 

I ordered this:




And recieved this:




These are the correct bungs. It turns out Ballistic Fab has changed their design. I'm a little bummed, but I think I can tweak my arm design to compensate.

Oh yeah, I also decided on 1.5" x 3" x 1/8" wall tubing and got me a 12' length for $38.

 

Here's my design to fit the bungs into place and shape the arms to not only be strong, but to look good as well.
Even though it's 1/8" wall, these arms are going to be beefy.

 

Well, it took 2 1/2 weeks, but I finally got my spindles back from the machine shop.

Behold! The worlds first Corvette hubbed, Solstice spindle.








A comparison of the hub thicknesses. The Solstice hub is on the left.



Here's an overlap showing how much material was removed from the bore.



The soltice hub to bore clearance was 1/100" and you could physically rattle it around in the bore. The machinist bored it out just enough for the C5 hub to have a snug fit. I mean it's right on. No slack, but it slips right in and out wiith ease. I then used a pencil grinder and made the bolt holes a little oblong so they would fit easily. Initially I was worried about weaking the spindle by removing too much material. It turned out that so little material was removed that I no longer have any worries about strength. It's practically as strong as stock.


Now I can get back to making the lower control arms. The lower balljoint angle on the spindle is 8*. I intend on running about 1* negative camber on the wheel. The lower control arm will be flat at ride height and move an equal distance up and down so I'm going to set the balljoint cup angle on the arm to about 9*.

The ball joint has 50* of movement! Wow, more than I realized. The lower arm will only move 18* so I have lots of room to play with. Maybe I'll shoot for a 10* balljoint cup to arm angle. It's a nice round number.

 

Good to see you moving forward with this

 

I've been reading up on bushing designs to find what would be best for my needs.

The Del-Spheres and Roto Joints seem to both suffer from high wear rates sometime needing tightening every few weeks and I just don't like that.

Rod ends perform well, but of course wear quickly and need to be replaced often and ride harshly.

So I got to thinking of a hybrid design that uses a rod end for the camber bushing and rubber for the caster bushing. That will give really good cornering feel and still soak up the bumps.

Now instead of an actual rod end, I'll replace it with a much bigger, cheaper and longer wearing ball joint.

So in the pic below, the red dots are the ball joints and the blue dots are rubber bushings.





What do you guys think of this design?

 

OMG. I have probably spent 3 hours reading all your various setups and the evolution of this project. Totally bad ***. I can't wait to see this completed.

 

Jason,

Very impressed with what you are doing with the Solstice upright. Any updates?
I'd love to see pics of the final (?) upright/spindle set-up and a list of the part numbers you settled on: Spindle, hub, ball joints, steering arm, etc.
If you could include rough costs that would help as well.
Nice piece of work!

Tom

 

Could you give me some help on the solstice front end conversion to c5 hub's Im looking to use for the front of my Falcon, would like to put it all into CAD to check geometry first, any help would be great please DM me, I tried your email and it came back as a old email.
Thanks

 

Some things happened and the whole project got scrapped. Sorry everyone. I don't even remember half the stuff I've done in this thread so I'm probably not able to help you out.

 

Ok, do you recollect if the geometry on solstice was good with upper and lower control arms? What's the best conversion for the fbody's??

 

Solstice spindles were the plan. The hubs (i think C5) were easily fitted with minor boring out on the spindles. The upper and lower control arms are no problem since I was using custom units. The main geometry issue was the steering linkage and its relationship to the steering rack. I did not want any bump steer issues and I figured out it would work. That was about as far as I got.

I never got into counting the pulses on the hub reluctor to see if was the same as stock. I know there are small electronic units that can change the pulse count to make it factory if need be.