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PostPosted: Thu May 12, 2016 11:59 pm 
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Location: Huntsville AL
I've been on a buggy hiatus far to long.

I've wanted a single seat rail buggy with a motorcycle drive train for years. Something like a honda pilot on steroids. We ran across the plans for building AR51 buggies. My brother in law, Jason, decided he wanted to build one as well so he purchased the plans. I managed to buy a complete CBR900 as a donor for my buggy. It's late enough to be a fuel injected bike. It should move along a 900lb buggy plenty. Jason managed to find a ZX1000 engine.

After we got the plans in hand, we started cutting out parts on my CNC plasma table. Nesting parts together like this lets you minimize the wasted plate. There's a lot of weigh reducing holes in these parts.

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Here's some more parts cut out. These are for the rear suspension upright. I apparently neglected to take a picture of them completed. I'll go dig them out and take a picture shortly.

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I do have a close up of welding them up. We used some all thread through the holes to make sure they lined up and keep the sides far enough apart.

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Last edited by Griffin on Fri May 13, 2016 12:25 am, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Fri May 13, 2016 12:11 am 
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We cleaned the slag off of all those parts. It was a time consuming pain. This made me start looking for a better way.

Image

The next thing we started working on was building the front spindles. Apparently I take to many close up pictures and not some of the whole part. We turned down the back of the spindle pins in the lathe. These are a standard off the shelf spindle. Probably made for a trailer or something along those lines.

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I managed to cut out the sprockets on the plasma table. I think they will work just fine but I don't have any of the right chain laying around.

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Sometimes its kind hard to get the plasma dialed in. I think I got this pretty good. It's 5/16 a-36 plate.

Image


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PostPosted: Fri May 13, 2016 12:19 am 
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We have been making a bunch of the parts such as the pedals but I'm bad about not taking pictures. I'm going to try to remember to take them while I'm working on this buggy project. We have spent hours cutting tubing on the bandsaw for these. Building two of them at the same time seems to help as you just make twice as many parts on each setup. Two definitely aren't taking twice the amount of time vs building just one. We finally got the tubing in the other day that was holding us up from putting the floor of the frame together. We laid it out on my welding table. This table makes it really easy to get things nice and square.

Image

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PostPosted: Fri May 13, 2016 12:28 pm 
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Wow. Good looking fab work.

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PostPosted: Sun May 15, 2016 9:25 am 
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Wow, obviously some nice tools to play with! Curious about the decision to use square tubing instead of lighter round tubing?


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PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 8:32 am 
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looks good! I bet the slag is a pain to clean up!

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PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 1:55 pm 
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The square tubing is part of the plans I'm following to build this. If oriented correctly to the load, square tubing of the same size is actually stronger in plane.

The slag is a pain to clean up manually. I have since started using an acid bath. It makes it fall right off. A knotted wire wheel on a grinder works pretty good if I don't want to wait on the acid bath.


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PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 10:10 pm 
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Here's the rear suspension upright. It uses a dodge intrepid front hub bolted to it for a wheel bearing.

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Here's one showing the whole front spindle.

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We did the actual welding and final fit up the other day. We had previously been using the table to fit the tubes. We clamped it all over the place then tack welded it all together. We put all these stops on the table so we could easily and quickly line up the second frame. Jason commented that this is where this table really shines. It took us about 15 minutes to put the second one together. Most of that was me dressing the ends of some of the tubes to make them fit tightly.

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I almost ran out of clamps. There's only one more on the end of the table where I have been keeping them. I'll be getting some more shortly. I also used all the ball lock bolts that hold stuff down to the table.

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I'm excited to see these. Up to this point all we have been doing is making parts and pieces. This actually is beginning to look like something.

Image


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PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 10:40 am 
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I bet the second frame will go a lot quicker! do you have a cnc tube bender too? I bet if you get all the parts cut and the bottom tacked up, you may have something to sell. at least that way you could keep cost down without all the labor.. It would be a nice fit for those of us that would never buy a RZR but want to get away from the old VW suspension setup.

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PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 10:57 pm 
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This is not my original design so I don't have rights to build and sell them. I really do like the design and may approach Rick about building at least the chassis. Done in quantity, most of it wouldn't be to bad. I don't have a cnc tube bender. I do have pro tools 105. I have been looking at building/buying a cnc tube cutter. I have gone as far as looking at one in person from a vendor. I just bought two cnc mills a couple of weeks ago so getting them setup and tooled up will take all of my funds for a while. Just paying the riggers to pull them off the trailer and set them in place was kinda expensive.

I think you summed up one of my big reasons for building this buggy. I wouldn't buy a RZR(don't like CVT) but I kinda want to get away from having to use a lot of VW parts which are getting harder to find. Bad part is I have a pretty good sized VW parts stash. I think I have 3 bus transmissions, Subi adapter, two subi engines, probably 30 CV joints, a bucket full of vanagon/bus axle shafts, a couple of torsions, etc. I'm really wanting a buggy that is light, agile, and handles very well. Plenty of suspension travel is a plus as well. I think these have around 15 inches of travel. They are supposed to weigh around 850-900 lbs plus driver. Should be fun.


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PostPosted: Wed May 18, 2016 9:13 am 
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my little brother was just talking about buying a rzr and putting a 900-1300cc bike engine/trans in it. I think that would be cool too. I just cant put myself into anything mass produced like the rzr.

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PostPosted: Wed May 18, 2016 9:31 am 
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www.rickskraschsite.com


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PostPosted: Sun May 22, 2016 10:22 pm 
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Griffin wrote:
We cleaned the slag off of all those parts. It was a time consuming pain. This made me start looking for a better way.

Image

The next thing we started working on was building the front spindles. Apparently I take to many close up pictures and not some of the whole part. We turned down the back of the spindle pins in the lathe. These are a standard off the shelf spindle. Probably made for a trailer or something along those lines.

Image

I managed to cut out the sprockets on the plasma table. I think they will work just fine but I don't have any of the right chain laying around.

Image

Sometimes its kind hard to get the plasma dialed in. I think I got this pretty good. It's 5/16 a-36 plate.

Image



Look for a used "Vibratory Tumbler" Thats what I use and its painless,toss all parts in walk away come back in 10min but they are loud


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PostPosted: Wed Jun 01, 2016 8:17 pm 
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I hate cvt also that the main reason for building the gsxr woodsbuggy. That and the fact that rzr break to easy


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PostPosted: Mon Jun 06, 2016 10:36 am 
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I can't stand CVT transmissions. I guess it's from growing up riding dirt bikes and full manual atvs. I don't own a single automatic transmission vehicle.

Jason and I got some time to work on the buggy Sunday afternoon. I've been extremely busy in the shop so things are probably going to progress slowly until things slow down. I can only work on this when I have room in the shop. As a result, we will probably do some things in a weird order. We want to make progress when we have the opportunity. I received an order of material this week that had some of the od sizes of tubing used to make these buggies. We decided to go ahead and turn out the rear bearing carriers. The spool will pass through this that holds the rear brake rotor and sprocket as well as hooks up to the cv joints. We cut the material to rough length with the bandsaw then threw it in the lathe to face the ends. This is 3" .188 wall DOM.

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These were good for Jason to be involved in making. He's learning to use the lathe. We didn't take a bunch of pictures as we were kinda trying to concentrate on what we were doing. Doing this kind of work without a digital read out is pretty tedious. I really should outfit this lathe with a DRO. The end result was good. These should work fine.

Image

That's all we had time to work on this round.


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PostPosted: Mon Jun 06, 2016 12:48 pm 
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isn't that a little thin wall for holding a bearing or will it get a plate or something welded over the OD?

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PostPosted: Mon Jun 06, 2016 1:55 pm 
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There's a 3" shaft collar that gets mounted to the outside of these. This was done from the plans. If it proves to be a problem, I'll redo it with a thicker piece. It's around 0.090 thick.


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PostPosted: Tue Sep 20, 2016 2:57 pm 
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We managed to make some more progress on this. We received all the material for the nose so we started off cutting tubing. After cutting everything, we had to drill 4 holes in 4 pieces of tubing. They need to line up pretty well because there are plates with weld nuts that get slid inside of the tubing to provide mounting points. Our Bridgeport is a great way to do this.

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Once the pieces were drill and welded the inserts in, we used a square to lay them out. You can see the directions book in the background suggesting to o do it this way. It sure makes it way easy and quick.

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Another sub assembly needed to be made before we could put the nose together. The jig table makes this pretty easy. We had to do several so we put the 90s on to make it easy to load a second set of tubing without having to do a bunch of centering again.

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We put some tabs on them and called them done for now.

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We cut out this alignment plate on our cnc plasma and bolted it to the inserts that we had welded in previously. This let us line up the sub assembly and the front lower control arm mount.

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We rolled it up on it's front so we could put in the spacer tubes. It was close but not quite the correct dimensions we had to pull it in line.

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We had to make one more sub assembly before we could put the nose together.

Image

Here's one of the nose pieces with everything all tacked together.

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PostPosted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 12:26 am 
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Time sure flys by sometimes. I've not been able to work on the buggy as much as I would like. I've had a lot of things that have taken up my time instead of working on my buggy project. We made all the bushings for the front and rear control arms the other day. We decided to give a try making them in our newly accquired VMC. Getting the VMC delivered, setup, and tooled up is only of the things that has taken up my buggy project time. It's also a steep learning curve to go from manual machinery to running a cnc mill.

We cut all the bar stock to length. We cut the piece a bit longer as to have enough to hold onto. The excess was to be machined off afterwards in the second operation.
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Here's Jason, my BIL who is building the second buggy, running bushings in our VMC.
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Two full sets of bushings done with the first operation.
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On to the second operation. This was just facing the shoulder to length and chamfering the holes.
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Here's the full sets all done with 5 spares.
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We'll be back to bending tube and building the frames shortly.


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PostPosted: Sun May 14, 2017 3:02 pm 
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We started off this round cutting some more tubing.

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Sometimes things just don't go as planned.

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I of course forgot to order a spare blade last time I ordered stuff like this. Time to try my hand at welding it up. I figured getting it lined up good would be the first step.

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These are pretty tedious to weld. I welded it on both sides then ground it down. I heated it up cherry red with a torch to try to anneal it. It worked out and is still on my saw a week later.

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There's some odd notches in this part of the frame for the tubing to go through. We set them up in the mill to notch. Keep in mind since we are building two buggies that setup time isn't as much of a big deal if it means getting through the overall parts quicker. It's also hard to argue with the accuracy of using a mill. I didn't take any more pictures of stuff done in the mill but we also used it to drill all the holes in the tubes(10 ea). I'm getting fairly proficient at putting together a quick program to do things like this. I like being able to load a part in the machine and press the go button. We also made the tap plates for the motor mounts in the mill.

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Laying out the next frame layer on the jig table.

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Here it is all jigged up.

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Image

Jason holding up the two frame sections.

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PostPosted: Sun May 14, 2017 8:29 pm 
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NICE.

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PostPosted: Tue May 16, 2017 12:42 pm 
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I impressed with the blade welding!!! I would have never even tried.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 06, 2017 12:48 pm 
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nice work!


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PostPosted: Sun Sep 17, 2017 4:16 pm 
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It's been to long. We got back to working on the buggies the other day. I had taken a while off due to going to ride in Colorado for two weeks and having to get ready. We made some progress on the frames. They are starting to look like a buggy. Unfortunately all my previous pictures were on photobucket.

ImageIMG_0938 by Griffin93, on Flickr

ImageIMG_0936 by Griffin93, on Flickr

ImageIMG_0935 by Griffin93, on Flickr

ImageIMG_0933 by Griffin93, on Flickr


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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2017 12:16 am 
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The chassis are starting to get a bit large to drag in and out of the shop by hand. I decided the best way to do something about that would be to build a couple of custom stands to hold them. I'm going to bolt them to the chassis with some tabs that will line up with the mounts for the nerf bars.

First, we cut all the tubing to length and jigged it up on the table.
Image

Then, we welded it all out and cut a top from 1/8" plate. After we're done building the buggies I plan to add extensions to the leg to use these as work benches.
Image


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