Very Interesting . . . and surprising!

A couple of hours this morning taken up with getting the last of the oil coolers from the powder coater and shipping them off.

Frustrating when you want to get on with the build but it pays the overheads.

The little bit done yesterday working on the back of the truck showed very quickly that that way was going to be very difficult. So time to take it off. . .

This was a bit of a test to see what it would be like for real but without a full load.
So install the airbags (these are taken off when welding to avoid possible damage).
Clamp in some temporary cross bracing.
The exercise yesterday for finishing the mounts showed that it could be unstable under certain conditions.
Undo the bolts.
Make sure nothing was connecting truck and body.
Close the escape valve.
Open the control valves.
Let in the air.
Very nice. The whole thing lifted with about 2 bar pressure.
Very slowly drive the truck out from underneath.


TAH DAH !!














It took a couple of false starts to realise the sequence for lowering was not the exact opposite of raising; not very different but just enough to make sure you needed to keep your wits about you.
Start here :





















End here. . .

















A nice working height, which can be altered without too much trouble.

Actually a very interesting experience.
The workshop air compressor was used as the truck fumes would be uncomfortable inside the workshop for the amount of time required for the operation.
The end which had been worked on was at least twice as heavy as the other end so it tended to lower first and keep pressure in the other end which would not lower until the heavy end was all the way down to the next stop.
This required the taps to manipulated individually (or at least in pairs) to keep the whole thing even.
Even though it proved to be much more stable with more weight involved there was an interesting little phenomena which developed; the "sticktion" within each leg was slightly different which caused minute vibrations to start and then synchronise resulting in quite a significant rocking motion which necessitated stopping as soon as it was detected to avoid the possibility of a complete collapse.
Hopefully when loaded more evenly and with greater total weight this may smooth out.
The cross bracing will definitely need to be in place so this will need a better long term solution.
The other unexpected result was that because of the higher pressure flowing in 6mm tubing it took quite a while for the air to flow when lifting. Lowering didn't seem to be a problem.

So with the height more convenient a little bit more was actually accomplished.























I think I better order some more tubing PDQ!