Mighty Morphin Suburban

[ozzie]

Question, on adding those shoulder belts - is it legal to add a 3-pt belt to a car that has no belts or a 2-pt lap belt?

It would be a really dumb law if it is, but I don't think so. There are companies that sell generic 3 point seat belts with ye olde timey styling for retrofitting into older cars.

EDIT: Although...I am not a lawyer, but I think if the 3 point belt failed, the person who installed it could be held liable.

[RedCar]

You know, that is a good question that i did not consider.
I guess if the burb ever leaves my possession that it is probably a good idea to remove the belts in case a litigious asshat crashes it someday.
It's funny what accessories we take for granted.  I want to say that turn signals were a decadent add on. Same for cigarette lighters, rear view mirrors, and passenger side sun visor (burb has none of these). Seat belts? Nah. Self squirting window washers? Dream on. Electric window wipers were a brand new gimmick over the old vacuum powered ones.

[twotone_ra64]

EDIT: Although...I am not a lawyer, but I think if the 3 point belt failed, the person who installed it could be held liable.

For sure. That's exactly why I wrote a big disclaimer for the 6th-gen Celica seatbelt retrofit writeup I made a while back. If anyone wants to do it, and you have a crash, and it goes wrong... don't blame me. It would definitely be a dumb law, but I was looking into it while I was in the middle of the swap. My coworker from Brazil says it's very illegal down there. Just a point to cover you own a$$ in case the car changes hands like you said, RedCar. You did a good job installing the shoulder belt hook on your burb.

[ozzie]

You know, this would probably be a good question for Steve Lehto, aka Lehto's Law

[RedCar]

Cool channel! That guy has a lot of interests.

Here's an update on the big yellow:
In july I drove it up to Colorado to be in a parade with Grandma. Summer driving was a little more exciting (although slower) because of gas boiling in the carb and radiator boiling over.
Upon return home I decided to find out where all the coolant was going (it needed frequent refills even when not boiling over) and found cracks in two of the combustion chambers. So, i decided to get a new cylinder head and rebuild the engine.

Deciding to rebuild ye ol chevy 235 inline was just the start of my fools errand... Since i couldn't bring myself to to buy stock 7:1 compression pistons with ultra fat rings, CP is now building some custom pop up pistons to bring the ratio up to 9.5 or so and incorporate modern design features like narrower rings and piston skirt.

Since that's taking so long, I got distracted with more ridiculous things like, spare tire mount, rebuilding transmission, transfer-case, and frame notching the front to accommodate more suspension travel.

Here are pictures!

spare tire mount project:




engine remove:



front frame notch plan:


It's pretty miserable driving miles of washboardy roads with only 1" of up travel... it would probably make sense to just do a suspension lift, but then it wouldn't fit in the garage... already have to air down the tires to avoid roof scraping.

Also found a pto spline on the back of the t-case and am pyched to hook an air compressor onto it!


but will require making a 'gear box' to engage or disengage



The steel yard guys are going to plasma cut the spline coupler from two 3/8" layers along with the shift fork and mounting flange... the rest is just pipes amazon bits and old bearings from the t-case rebuild... it will be sweet if it works 

[Sigma Projects]

such a cool project. What software are you using to do the material stressing? Is it just something within solidworks?

[RedCar]

Was using ansys after hours at work until our license went down... then used the built in analysis within Creo. Both had similar enough results for what i was doing. Just comparing stress in modified frame vs original. I'm sure solid works could have done it too.

I ended up changing it a little from the picture below by adding a plate over the side of the notch (on the inside). Expecting it to be almost as strong as original now.

[Sigma Projects]

I haven't heard of either, do you find them easier to use than Solidworks?

[RedCar]

I'm much more familiar with creo from work, and not that good at solidworks to make a fair comparison...

From my perspective Creo (used to be called Pro-E) is better at managing large assemblies (ie finding circular references, display layers, simplified reps, & linking part parameters to drawings). It also has built in analysis capability similar to solidworks. However, it's ultra expensive for anyone but a big buisiness... individual licenses are something like $2k per year.

Just recently i downloaded solidworks student version at home and used it to draw the 'gearbox'... (it's free after you spend $40 to join experimental aircraft association eaa). All the geometry creation buttons seemed pretty similar, except it's really annoying that it doesn't show you how to fully constrain your sketches. Creo has different colored dimensions that auto populate to show you exactly where things are underconstrained.

Ansys is a dedicated analysis software (not meant for designing). It's also super expensive. It can run on multiple CPUs and is better for big assemblies, and also for doing fancy types of analysis. Ie transient thermal, random vibration, dynamic structural, even thermal electric, and magnetics stuff.

[Sigma Projects]

nice, I think I will try to look for Creo to try it out. That or get someone to help me with Solidworks.