New logo?

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about what kind of image or logo I want to put on the side of my offroad buggy and start to be know by. I started sketching up some different things and thinking of what I could use for images or words. After many hours of throwing away scratch paper I had doodled on trying to get some good ideas flowing, here is what I came up with.

I'm not 100% sure yet that this will be my final design but for now it's what I'm thinking. Any thoughts? modifications? comments?



Starting on the Steering

This evening I started working on the steering, mounting up the orbital valve and steering ram and cleaning up the steering pump getting it ready to install. To mount the PSC orbital valve, steering column and steering wheel I figured out the most comfortable position to have the steering wheel in by sitting down in the seat and positioning it over and over again until I found a spot that I was pleased with. Then I just made a simple mount off of the frame crossmember and welded the orbital valve's mounting braket onto that. I also made up the frame for the dashboard that is going to have an aluminum plate mounted to it holding all of the gauges, buttons, and switches.

For the hydraulic steering ram, I turned the steering assembly all the way to the left as that is the positoin it will be in when the cylinder is fully retracted and then made some simple steel brackets with 3/4 inch holes to bolt it to the rod ends on the cylinder. One of the brakets was welded to the axle and the other to the connecting rod.

My next step with the steering is to find a spot to mount the steering pump that will not interfere with the frame or anything else and then do all the plumbing for it, bleed the system, and test it out.

There is a link to a great forum post on how to set up a hydraulic steering system on the right side of the page, it has helped me a lot in understanding how everything goes together and I would highly recommend it for anyone who is doing this kind of steering.

Changin' out the Powerplant

Today, I installed the torque converter into the TH350 transmission and then bolted it all up to the new Chevy 350, there's a good link on how to install a torque converter on the right side of the page. After I had this assembly together I pulled out the old engine and tranny and dropped this one in.

For mounts I used the same front mount that holds the engine up but since the transmission went from being a big manual truck transmission to an automatic TH350 I had to cut out the old transmission mount and make a new one further back. The new engine and tranny assembly fit very well in the frame area. I now am working on getting everything hooked back up like the carburetor and all the hoses and whatnot that I had to take off to drop it in the frame.

On a different note, after a long search I have finally found some wheels for the front. They are aluminum, Chevy 6 lug, 15 inch wheels that a friend had lying around and gave to me free of charge which is a great help as I am already quite a bit over budget. For tires I picked up some used 35 inch offroad tires off of Craigslist. The tires came with wheels but they were the wrong lug pattern so I am just going to turn around and sell the wheels to hopefully offset the cost of the tires, or at least the majority of it.