Folks,

Been welding up my de-dion (and if it wasn't for the fact i like my neighbours i would have finished but i thought mr angry gringer with flap disk at 9:30pm was a bit late!)

I'm curious what accuracy people aim for. I'm 0.5mm out on the width of my trailing arm brackets, 2mm out on the trailing arm spacing (over 1 meter apart).

More importantly i'm 0.5mm off having the faces that the hubs mount onto from being horizontal with each other (assuming my bench is flat) and i think i'm about 1mm off having them vertical with each other.

I'm rather pleased with myself (assuming nothing distorts with tonight's welding session) but i'm curious what people would aim for as a minimum accuracy. Eg would 5mm off vertical be ok?

I built a jig to weld mine up and it was still out. You can use thin washers when attaching the hub carriers to compensate for any misalignment.

I used a jig as well, the spacing is fine, the width is fine, the only thing that really matters to me was to get the faces of the hub mounts as close as possible to the correct postion I would say around 1mm max for the hub faces, 5mm would be a massive amount to shim up

With a jig I found it fairly easy to get this sort of accuracy

Cheers
David

I built a nice square jig for my de deon, axle was square when tackwelded, but distorted when fully welded, all sorted with some shims between axle and hub carriers, biggest shim is 0.5mm

If you go racing seriously with a solid axle you break out the welder and put some beads of weld to bend it for !

So bolt all up and on the car then shim up for a touch of toe in.

As its a tube you can do this with beads of weld as well so its not a worry at all.