Thread: Inferno

Outside the RH?

it doesn't make me smile, I'm totally bewildered by why you want to do it , let alone watch it.

John Kelly tried it once ...well a couple of times...at Archerfield Speedway at interval , but it proved so unpopular he stopped it.

There is a "burnout" pad there and people pay to go there midweek to watch it.

Next door is a go kart track which has become a burnout associate...drift cars. Another senseless use of vehicles.

That’s about how I remember my FJ40 handling
Horrible unstable vehicle in the day friends were killed in them when they rolled them and the fibreglass roof fell off
Beats me why they want to lift them up and drive them around the streets
That said they were good bull catchers

The steering relay on early FJ40s was an appalling design that ensured plenty of lost motion.

Originally Posted by JDNSW

The steering relay on early FJ40s was an appalling design that ensured plenty of lost motion.

And the early full size Jeeps, Wagoneer and Gladiator were the same, with their lack of castor making them almost undrivable at times.
Dad fitted castor wedges under the axle spring pads to get some straight line stability back as the constant correction nearly wore him out, especially with a caravan on the back.

I did the same with the 1969/70 Gladiator I had in the early 90's, but at least by that stage Jeep had ditched the relay rod and mounted the steering box at the front of the chassis with the pitman arm connected directly to the drag link.

I'm fond of the FJ/HJ 'Cruisers, there's a couple of nicely restored examples getting around here

The early FJ had two major design shortcomings in the steering.

The steering relay is a bell crank, pivoting on two bushes spaced about an inch apart. But the two arms are bent, one up and one down. This puts a high load on the bushes, but also means that the inevitable wear on the bushes is multiplied, as the whole bell crank tilts up and down as load is reversed.

The drag link, instead of going to a separate eye on the steering arm on the LH swivel housing, goes to a tie rod end on the front of the track rod, about three inches from its LH end. This means that, as the steering relay is above the track rod, every reversal of load on the drag link has to twist the track rod to the limit of the tie rod ends, before any steering action happens. Not only does this mean more lost motion, but the extra movement on the TREs means accelerated wear.

These problems were largely rectified by the late sixties.

To be fair, there were substantial revisions to Landrover steering in the 1948-51 period (including revisions to swivels and relay and moving the front spring shackles from the front of the springs to the back. But by the time they fixed it, land cruisers had been in production for close to twenty years.