Every day priorities like moving home, exams, barbeques and playing new playstation games have unfortunately put the van's rebuild on the back burner for the last month or so (I just don’t want to miss out on any of the summer sunshine, you never know how long it will last). But I have managed to get the front caliper mounts machined. A friend that knows their way around a CAD program was able to help me in a morning produce an engineers' drawing. We started drawing all the known dimensions e.g. brake disc size, caliper size and spindle mounting hole pitch, from these we were able to calculate all the dimensions required for the mount, then with an outline added we created the virtual caliper mount. This wasn’t far from the rough sketch I'd made in the garage to produce the wooden prototype, the hardest part was calculating the curve that would match the profile of the caliper inner mounting lug.
I sent the drawing to a local machine company (Cranford Engineering) that was able to do the machining at a decent price. I chose solid steel as I didn’t fancy trying to calculate the strength and shear properties of aluminium. I was very pleased with the end result, with a clean up, coat of paint, a few new bolts and the front brakes will be ready. Unfortunately I won't be able to test them until the van is rolling.
