Hi everyone. I've been lurking around this site for a while and am looking at building a McSorley based chassis with a miata donor. I can't start working on it until summertime (school) so I'm in the brainstorming stage.

Being a first-year Mechanical Engineering student I have access to the Solidworks CAD package. Soooo i've been working on modeling my chassis in this program and messing around with it before i start building.

I am following the McSorley +442 designs exactly at first, then i will do my own tinkering however ive run into a slight problem. My question is if there are any errors in the plans, specifically the front L assembly. I made all the correct angled cuts on the computer but when i assembled them they were off by quite a bit. Anyone have any trouble with this particular section of the chassis? It is entirely possible that i am doing it wrong on the program because i have very limited experience with the software but i figured i would check just to make sure i'm not missing something simple.

Thanks guys.

I'd be surprised if there were any mistakes there- lots of people have used his plans and I've heard no one else mention a problem.

At the end of the day, it should be too hard to check with a bit of trigonometry.

Atb,
James

Well, if there are big gaps between the tubes then yes, there is a problem with what you've drawn - if it's just that there is a bit of overlap at some of the points where some of the tubes meet then no, thats how Mr McSorley has drawn them.

The plans were spot on for me, just had to gusset behind the front top bracket.

Plans for the 442 were spot on for me BUT
the wish bone mounts do not fit on the chassis rails as you would want them to. See my archive photo's for an explanation. Basically the tube angles from the footwell to the front are different from the "book" and I for one did not think about hoe this affected the wishbone setup
Good luck.

Just to clarify my answer - I'm talking about drawing the tubes on CAD and then assembling them on CAD as is I believe Mr pucksaver. In virtual reality the joins between some tubes aren't quite as perfect as us CAD monkeys are used to - if you download the IGES files from the McSorley site you can see that they didn't quite work for him either.

Obviously they work fine in the real world.

Ok, thats good to hear. Some of the joints were slightly off (2-3 degrees variance) so i wont worry about those right now. However, the top tube (i think its LC) doesnt meet up with LA and LB as close as i wanted (1/2" off) so i will just recheck my angles i suppose, or use a different feature to cut my angles... perhaps thats the problem. What do you guys think is an acceptable error gap for where tubes meet up? And yes, all of this is in CAD at the moment... i havent done any real-life assembling yet.