BUILDING

ENGINE CARTS

Part 6 by Jason Ballamy

Although a lot of the smaller engine carts don't have an articulating front axle, this cart is styled more on the larger ones so I looked around for some suitable designs and came up with this.

The front axle will have a long top clamp and two small lower clamps the same as the ones on the rear axle. Some 1/4 x 1" material had a slot milled out of it to fit over the axle, four holes drilled and the outside shaped to match the lower clamp plates. I also milled a shallow 5mm wide slot along the top into which I silver soldered an angled plate with a pivot hole.


I did not take a separate photo of the fork but it is a simple turning job with a 1/2" square bar soldered to it, that is slotted and drilled to take the axle top clamp.

To make the bolster that goes between the two side rails I started with some 3mm thick material and milled it out to leave a circular ‘turntable’ in the middle. The shallow slot is to locate the vertical part of the I-beam section


It was then just a case of soldering up some plates to complete the I-beam, with end plates and a round boss in the middle. Looks like the solder flowed nicely along all the joints.


This is how it will fit within the two rails


The engine needs a couple of cross pieces to bolt to as the mounting holes in the base casting are not that widely spaced. So I welded up a couple more short bits of angle to form some short C-channels


After soldering on some end plates the channels were notched to fit within the side rails, I won't drill them until I have finalised the position of the engine.


The engine uses quite a few square headed fixings which I had previously made


So I also had to make up a batch for the cart, apart from the 4 very long ones the rest were cut from 8mm round as I did not have the size square stock that I wanted and off the shelf square in small sizes often has rounded corners.

 
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