With a million details, it's easy to miss one - even if it's obvious.
This is a bit of a story, so bear with me.
My 34 had been sitting in storage for three years while I was working in Italy. Now that I have settled in Texas, I've been going over it from stem to stern, particularly the steering. The steering wheel has always been indexed a little to the right, which isn't a real problem except for aesthetics. However, when my youngest son and I took it for a ride a couple of weeks ago, the steering was also a little too loose for me.
I tried adjusting the Vega box, but it just wouldn't set up correctly. When I took a close look at the innards, it was pretty worn out - which told me that Gibbon had most likely pulled a Vega box from a junker and repainted it. I set it in the junk pile, and ordered a new Flaming River roller bearing version of the same box and installed it.
When I set the Pitman arm parallel to the centerline of the chassis, the drag link was approximately three inches too long. I measured and re-measured and couldn't figure out how I had gone that many years with that problem. Then I went back and looked at some photos I took when I brought the roller home from Gibbon in Darlington. Guess what? When Gibbon built up this chassis from P&J components, they narrowed the frame at the front. (Gibbon called it the Viper II) That's all well and good - except they used a drag link for a standard '34 chassis - which happens to be about 3" too long.
Not only did I not notice this during my final assembly, but when I eventually replaced the drag link with a chrome unit, I used the same length. I got on the phone with Jason at P&J, and we worked out the correct length based on my measurements. P&J had the replacement here in three days.
I'm still sitting here thinking, "With six years of engineering school and quite a bit of chassis construction behind me, how the heck did I miss that one?" :confused:
