Virtual Chassis Construction

Over the winter months, I started teaching myself how to use Autodesk Fusion 360.  The main advantage of this software is that it does a free educational licence version - and being that my son is still at secondary school, I signed him up on my behalf!

I originally just wanted to be able to design a couple of brackets for the Cobra build - but things got a bit out of hand...

I had started to design a bracket to hold the brake pipes and clutch pipe on the chassis leg with some unions to allow the pipes up to the master cylinder to be added later once the body is on (there will be a separate post on this).  

I wanted to see how this bracket would sit on the chassis rail and to check the mounting position.  So I started modelling a portion of the front of the AK chassis...

Then I thought I could use this portion of modelled chassis to check the brake and clutch pipe routing - part of the tubular bracing on the AK Gen III chassis creates a very narrow path for the front brake and clutch lines.  This eventually turned into deciding to model all the brake and clutch pipe routings so I could decide where to put the pipe clips to ensure a maximum spacing of 300mm.

Well over many long winter evenings I managed to model up practically all of the AK chassis - and then spent a few more evenings remodelling some bits of it when it was apparent some of my measurements were not correct.

It's not fully complete - I still have to finish off the tubular bracing parts - but I've included a couple of pictures below.  I've added a sneak preview of part of the chassis with brake pipes and clips modelled - I'll cover this more fully in one of my posts on the fixing of the brake lines.  There's also a part-finished render from Fusion 360 of this section of the chassis (the processing power of my Mac isn't up to getting the full render done!) - let's see if it looks as good when I actually finish it!