82: Sunday 13th December 2009

Spent nearly all day welding. Anyway, you can see from the photo below that the battery supports are now fabricated. Remember the wooden model and you can see the metal version now. It is slightly different, but then I wasn't using wooden angle iron, so what do you expect! I then went on to making the bearing support for the intermediate shaft. I forgot to take a photo of this though. It was very fiddly to fix together and mount as access for a spanner behind the angle iron was limited. I had a brainwave and welded the nuts on the back of the angle iron, now just slip the bolts in and it is easy. This bracket start at the gearbox bolt, meets the bearing support half way along, then a plate around the corner joins onto the motor mount bolt. It was absolutely rigid when secured, so no worries there. I gave the motor a little run with a single 12v battery just to ensure everything still ran nice and smooth and produced no weird noises. All o.k. there as well.