I've got a project in mind, I'm starting to collect parts for it when stuff turns up cheap, and I've got the beginnings of a frame laid out in Solidworks, but I need some inspiration and a sanity check. I'm looking for pictures, etc. of '20s and '30s - even early post-WWII if anything comes to mind - speedway racers, road racers, sports cars, anything with a two-seat roadster body on a ladder frame with parallel rails. Really mostly looking for examples with channel or box-section rails exposed beneath the body but if there's something interesting with a couple tubular rails I'd love to see it. And if you've got any thoughts on where I could get thisclose to some of these vehicles - early '20s and 'junk formula' speedway cars, '30s road racers, one-off rods of the era, etc - with a camera, measuring tape, and notebook, I'd appreciate any help I can get.
I did the opposite, I used an A frame, goal was to make the bucket body follow the frame. Firewall was close so the cowl was pie cut back toward the windshield & bent together. The touring rear section has some cut out of the center. Widening a body would mean crowning some filler panels with a wheel, but should not be real tough to do, grille shell would have to be a 1 off, more like a track frontend, I can't picture a 3' wide flat grille shell looking good.
What do you mean by "junk formula"? I'm working on a frame made from Model T rails, and I'll probably have to add some rectangular tubing for the top (not a roadster) frame. I think one of them there ConCoors de Elegance would be a good place to look for ideas. I imagine there are organizations along the Pacific Coast. Post your drawing(s).
Junk Formula was a slang term applied to to a change in the "formula" for cars competing in the Indy 500. This rules change came about as an attempt to lower the price of competing in the race and to return the cars to something closer to real life automobiles. The formula allowed engines up to 366 CI (6 Liters) if based on stock mass produced engines. Superchargers were banned for 4 cycle gasoline engines and 2 seat cars were mandatory, as was the inclusion of a "riding" mechanic. The prior formula had been for single seat cars with 91 CI (1.5 liter) engines. Miller made cars and engines dominated that formula and speeds skyrocketed. In the opinions of many, the advent of the Junk Formula signaled the end of the Golden Age of American motorsport. On the other hand, looking back at these cars from today's vantage point is certainly interesting.
As Lakester said above, Millers. Were like swiss watches. Look at a few for inspiration, I still do for the little details. Amazing cars.
Think others clarified that. Depression era speedway cars, some developed from the magnificent '20s race hardware and some built off production chassis, they went back to two-seat cars, sticking another casualty - er, excuse me, riding mechanic - on board, etc. What I'm trying to figure out is whether one can get practical usable side-by-side seating in something with parallel frame rails and more or less straight body sides at least from the cowl back, without pushing the frame rails so far apart that it looks awkward or grows too big, or whether I really have to taper them out a bit to fatten the cockpit. I think I've figured how to pull off a floating-cantilever leaf rear suspension (think the bottom half of the Napier-Railton's four-spring rear setup, with a couple upper radius rods instead of springs) with some 3/4-ton Suburban rear springs (shame I just scrapped one of those, I could have used some of the parts now...) - they're the right length and close to the right load/rate, might not be the right arch - but I need enough room between the rails and the wheels to make it look right. I want it on the outside of the frame Napier-Railton style, not under the car Maserati/Jag Mk II style. Soon. Right now it's basically separate frame rails and crossmembers, finalizing some basic dimensions (something like 110in wheelbase and 58in track, tire sizes somewhere between 600-18 and 700-19), waiting for the front suspension bits to get here for rebuilding so I can confirm that what I'm planning (*cough* '37 Chevy Dubonnet *cough*) will work. I've got a paper-and-pencil side-view of the basic concept that I might try to scan...
JEM, I have pndered the same problem myself. My avatar has my first shot at it. I made it a single seat because I couldn't come up with an idea that had the look I wanted and room for two people. Even so, the frame rails are tapered from the cowl forward. At the widest point, the frame rails are 30" outside measurement. Another complication was I wanted the side high as this is a dry lakes style car, pre WW II streamliner. I have a ladder style frame I am contemplating using to try and do exactly what you suggest. The rails are 35" wide outside measurement. I haven't come up with a good plan yet, even staggering the seating. I'm a pretty good size guy and that complicates things a lot. Also you must have room for your feet to operate three pedais and that is difficult. I want to sit very low (between the frame rails, not on top of them) and the driveshaft and tranny are major problems. I plan to cut the cockpit side down low such as an Indy or GP car, so you can let your arm and shoulder have a bit more room. Since you mentioned the Napier-Railton, I assume you are planning open wheel. You have an interesting choice for front suspension. I am planning 19" wheels myself. Are you planning an inline engine? if so, that starts causing problems with the WB. Having been through this once before I can tell you things start getting really tight. I look forward to your ideas and anyone else that wants to chime in. Lakester
Is this what you are looking for? http://i197.photobucket.com/albums/aa149/51pontiac/hotrod1640x480.jpg Sorry - totally misread your question
i narrowed mine (single seat)to 30" parallel....28 chev frame. was easy . 29" or less would have been an incredible amount of work....stock pedals , motor mounts, trans mounts , front cross, steering ......all would have needed mods. . i basically took out all the rivets and used the forward most holes as pivot points and cut everything else to fit.....i'm not 100% happy with the look but it works.
A lot of these cars (even the two man cars) had frames that followed outside the body outline. Some race cars with cut downs instead of doors dropped the body down between the frame on a continuous "L" bracket bolted to the top web of the frame rails, and riveted or bolted to the outer body sheetmetal. The rails were only parallel at the front and/or rear if needed to accomodate parallel leaf springs. Where the frame rails were outside the body envelope the frame was often accented by painting a contrasting colour.
Have you considered using a rear end with the pumpkin offset? That's where an inline might come in handy.
I intend to use an inline and an offset pumpkin, however when you Do this you are reducing the width of the passengers seat. Everything you do is a trade off.
A few more of the thoughts I'm working from right now: 1) It's going to be an underslung frame, once again the "93%-scale Napier-Railton" thing but not so deep in section (my working design has 2x6 tubular rails.) Yeah, the scrub lines work out fine at both ends as long as I've got at least 18in wheels. The floating-cantilever rear suspension design dictates that the frame rails need to be pretty much parallel for five feet in front of the axle. 2) For cost and convenience reasons the engine's probably going to be a 454 BBC I've already got laying around here, it's complete and intact and runs fine and finding drivetrain parts that'll bolt to it will be easy enough. Not traditional...okay, I promise not to open the hood, and if nothing else it's the right size and weight to fill the hole until some earlier Vee engine comes along. A big inline really doesn't fit the size I've got in mind right now. 3) Right now it's looking like, to get 6" ground clearance I want under the engine and the height of the pinion in the hand-me-down 9" rear with 31"-ish rear tires, the crankshaft/trans output shaft and diff pinion centerlines will be just about level with the tops of the frame rails. That plus jounce-travel clearance for the driveshaft will dictate the minimum possible seat height, but I'm not quite sure how low I want to go. Looks like I'm going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: grab a couple pieces of 2x6, an M20 trans (maybe something top-shifted would buy more width...) or something the size of one, a couple 5-gallon buckets and a plank, lay it all out on the floor and see how much room I need and how much I've got. "Hi honey, I need you to come sit on a bucket. It'll only take a minute...yes, really." Even with the BBC I should be able to offset the engine (transmission, driveshaft, diff pumpkin) a bit. My wife is short and has small feet...and I hope I can assume we'll still be married when this is finished. 4) The Dubonnet front end appeals to my sense of curiosity, and they're definitely of the right period - Alfa even had some reasonable success racing with the Dubonnet design. I'm told they can be made not to leak, though it'll cost a few bucks, and if I can transplant the kingpin ends of the axle beam onto a straight tube it'll basically mount right on top of the frame rails, no muss, no fuss, no bumpsteer. Have to play with the springs to get the right ride height loaded, no doubt - book says a '37 Chevy Master Deluxe is 3000lb, don't recall if/what it said for front/rear distribution...
I've been collecting info and photos for a similar car for several years now. But if you really want ll rails, just do a single seater. As soon as you add the extra seat for the pax / mech, you're going to have to widen the rear of the car, like a Model A frame design. I'm somewhat conflicted in my ideas / designs, they always start out simple and then end up looking like a hot rod or oval track version of vintage GP car like an Alfa or a junk formula Indy car - also crossed with a 50's Jag, Morgan, Lotus 7 or MG that has a little more baggage to haul around, plus a spare tire, some sort of roof, rollup windows and larger than planned fenders. Who knows where the level of simplicity and creature comforts will eventually level out at. I hope this will be my next build. A car that I can take on one of those vintage rallys like Coker puts on, but modern enough mechanically to run for 1000's of trouble free miles (probably a Ford or Chevy Ecotec I-4). It would also be one that you could occassionally replace the tall skinny wires with short fat slicks and try autocrossing. Gary
Ixnay on the Dubonnet. They were a terrible suspension, even GM couldn't make them work. If that is the look you are after how about a VW beetle trailing arm setup? For a heavy car with 454 use the bus version? Alfa used something similar and so did the postwar Healeys, Donald Healey copied the Alfa design and came up with something very like the VW bus but with aluminum trailing arms. If you use the VW suspension change the steering to R&P
As far as style of car, it sounds like I'm headed in the same direction; track nosed 26 T roadster on a 30 AA frame with parallel front leaf suspension and mopar steering box using an 8.8 Exploder rear end on rocker suspension (I haven't decided if I'm using the stock Ford AA hardware or making my own) powered by a 4.2 litre Jag six and T5 on 18 or 20 wheels.
I understand what you're saying about the Dubonnet. But I want to give it a try. They've got certain dynamic limitations - no anti-dive, roll-center location/no camber gain in roll - that ought not matter too much in a low-CG roadster with skinny tires, but they've got certain good points - relatively low unsprung weight and zero bumpsteer - that should. Yes, when new they were a maintenance nightmare, the rope packings on the trailing-arm pivots didn't work worth a damn and the early ones were full of needle bearings that weren't up to the impact loads on the trailing arms and the kingpins. Dynamically, a VW trailing-arm setup would be at least as good and more easily (or at least more cheaply) tunable, but it's not quite 'period' enough, a little too much kit-car in the same sense as an MII arrangement. And I'm just dumb enough to want to try something really different. I'm about a month and a half out from tearing into the thing, what's involved in replacing the packings with lip seals; '36-up are supposed to have bronze bushings that should be adequately durable.
The Miller Offy site. Lots of photos and great sounds. http://www.milleroffy.com/Racing Links.htm Lots of ideas there. I've posted this link many times as it is a great one to garner ideas from http://www.nwvs.org/ They have a bit of everything.
I'm also going to take another look at some hot rods and vintage cars that use the same sized wheels and tires (or close to that) all around. Bigs n littles is probably a hard trend to buck, but there may be a way to pull it off. Gary
For what its worth, I agree with the earlier Hambers who urged you to consider a riding-mechanic Miller configuration. However here are photos of a 1917 (?) Marmon with very close to side-by-side seating. I rode in this car at the 2003 Miller Meet held at the Milwaukee Mile. The driver (a curator from the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, whose name escapes me) and I are both well over six feet tall (63). Im not saying the accommodations were roomy but it worked. On a different note, I used longitudinal torsion bars nested inside the frame rails on my roadster (as designed by Greg Peek), which makes for a very compact, clean, front suspension. This arrangement does not influence the width of the front frame rails as the lever arms from the torsion bars can be any length; then you just select a bar with the correct spring rate from the sprint car suppliers. I have included two photos of the Marmon and one photo of a riding-mechanic style Miller. The Duesenberg Bros. also had a beautiful riding-mechanic race car. Both the Miller and the Dusie had staggered seating. The frame rails arent parallel in the Miller, but pretty close. Im almost sure that the frame rails in the Marmon are parallel. As far as I know the Marmon is on daily exhibit at the Chicago Museum. Just some thoughts....
One thing I haven't seen mentioned on this thread yet is that back in the "junk formula" days, if you very closely at some of the cars they place the riding mechanic just ever so slightly behind the drivers posistion to "skinny" things up a bit. We're not talking huge amounts like say a two place plane or something, but just a few inches back and into the centerline of the car. Look close at some of the pictures. If you by chance have a copy of 1001 Custom and Rod ideas from October '77, there is a four page article discribing the junk formula and several pictures of what I'm yammering about. I'd scan mine, but my scanner is just about as usable for that purpose as a rock...
I met this guy at the gas station last Friday, it is based on a 1920's English Riley with a Tiger Moth aircraft engine, all hand built by him, totally perfect . Here is a link to a feature on the car http://www.classiccar.co.nz/articles/other-european/1931-riley-aero-special-rapid-riley-252
I'd greatly appreciate seeing those scans! I also think the mech's seat might have been a little behind so the driver had unobstructed use of his arms while driving. After all, it's hard to get your elbows up ifn the rider is hogging some of the precious elbow room! There may be other reasons too, like being able to reach stuff behind the driver's seat? Or? Later, Gary Gary
The Junk Formula rules allowed the seats to be staggered a maximum of 12". Of the existing cars I have personally examined, several had "holes" in the inboard side of the mechanic's seat. The hole allowed the mechanic to insert his arm around the back of the driver's seat. Doing so allowed a narrower seating arrangement and also gave the mechanic a place to hold on since none of these cars had any form of seat belt.
Kustoman, I love that aero-engined Riley. I am a big fan of the Gipsy Fiat, so the Riley really hit the spot with me. Thanks for posting, it's an exquisite car! Lakester
JEM, Here's one that I'm thinking about using as the basis of my speedster- Bill Castle's recreation of the Miller "Baby Chevrolet":
Gorgeous hardware. You've got your work cut out for you I'm trying to do something, well not exactly of anything in particular, but of a little later era. The cockpit of that de Havilland Riley looks like about the right size I'm looking for. Any idea what the overall width of the body is? Too much to hunt him down with a measuring tape... The rear frame dimensions and how much room I've got for springs and crap between the rails and the wheels are also going to depend on the wheel/tire size and, more particularly, offset. A 700-18 gets me enough diameter, and 18x5.5 seems to be a common bike rim size so maybe easier to come by wheels that size. Need to consider whether I want to try to convert the front end to something 5-lug or whether I want to get some 6x5.5 axles for the Ford 9in rear. And figuring out the narrowest decent transmission that you could put behind a 454.
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