The response I got from the setup stand build has been tremendous. Several folks have suggested that they’d like plans be made available so they can build their own set, and that they’d be happy to throw a few bucks my way for the time that went into developing them. I’m staggered, because I thought I’d make a couple sets for buddies and that would be it, and that would be that.
The directions include a materials list, a cut list, some 3D modeling and photographs of the stands.
Chances are that, having built a few sets now, I may have left out a few things that seem intuitive to me just from having done it several times. Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.
If you’d like the plans, e-mail me at amaff5@gmail.com and I’ll send a .PDF with the plans.
This is very much a hobby for me, not a business, and these are super useful tools for “us people”. I’d rather more of my racing buddies have access to them than not, so I’m making the plans available for free. Hell, if we had money to burn we’d just spend $2,000 on the commercially available options and be done with it.
That said, I have put a great deal of time and sweat (omg so much sweat you guys) developing these. If you feel that these were worth it and / or want to throw a few bucks in the hat / Tire Fund for the R&D done on these, you can do so here:
Now that the fabrication work is done on the setup pads, it’s time to set up the setup pads so that the setup pads can be use to set up the car.
Setup.
First thing’s first: Paint. It’s always paint.
Step 2 is…more paint, oddly enough. I picked a fairly central location in the shop for the setup pads, then got them on the car so that they could be squared up, so that their locations can be marked. This is so that each pad goes in the same spot, in the same orientation each time, that way once they’re leveled, they remain consistent.
I made up a stencil to use for marking the floor, put the foot of each corner on the circle in the middle, then marked out the perimeter with tape.
That done, the stands came out from under the car, the car was moved out of the shop, and each spot was marked:
Next it was time to level the full set. I started off by setting the feet to their highest setting so that I could find the lowest corner, and then adjust the rest of the pads to meet that corner.
CUE THE LASERS!!!
I used a couple of my big fabrication squares, made white backgrounds (to better see the laser) and then made a mark on each at the same level. Get the lines on the squares to meet the laser at both the front and rear of each pad, and you’ve got it level.
With the setup of the setup pads done, it was time to…. do some setup on the scales. Specifically, I was sick of dealing with the rats nest each time I unspooled the cables, so I made left- and right-side “harnesses” to keep things tidy. They’ll run under the car down the middle so that they’re out of the way of jacks and what not.
And with that, somehow, miraculously, despite taking what felt like most of my life, they’re complete and in service! They look great and will work great. Having now used them exactly once, they were already worth the effort. Being able to get and keep a consistent setup on the car (and help friends with their cars) can only be a good thing.
Roll off pads are very useful for setup, allowing a place to make alignment changes, to zero the scales, and to allow the tire to roll to undo any bind that setting changes may have introduced. They are also the thing that adds a TON of cost to the commercial setup stand options.
Since I’m fully committed at this point, might as well go big.
The pad itself will be a piece of 1/8″ aluminum sheet, supported on both sides and in the middle.
The side supports are made of 3/16″ steel bar with 3 holes per side drilled and a nut welded to the back side on each to secure the plate. The bars are supported on 3 sides, sitting on the frame on the short sides and 1 long side. Those bars on top of the frame puts the floor just a shade lower than the scale pads, allowing space for some thin grease plates to do alignments.
The center support is a length of 1″ bar with 3 holes through it. 1/4″ on one side for the bolts, and just about 1″ on the bottom to allow a 10mm socket with an M6 nut to be inserted from the bottom.
Once the 2 sides were done, the next challenge was fitting up the middle support tube such that it was dead level with the 2 sides so the floor is perfectly flat. To do that, I flipped the entire frame so that the side-supports were flat against the welding table, then placed the tube in to get tacked up so that the welding table top became the reference surface for the whole setup.
With the frames completed, it was time to fab up the floor. After rough-cutting it, clamped it to the frame and drilled the 3 central holes as they can be accessed from underneath. The challenge, however, was to get the position of the 6 holes on the sides that were covered up by the angle iron.
This is where a DILYSI Dave hot tip came in incredibly handy. Long ago when I was building the new Seat Mounts, he suggested making some blind transfer punches out of some bolts. I made up a few more so I’d have a full set for this job. I threaded them into the holes, then bolted down the 3 central bolts so that the floor would be in the correct place, then gave each location a sharp whack with a rubber mallet to mark its location on the aluminum sheet for drilling.
With the prototype nearly complete, I wanted to do some strength testing (ie: dropping the car on it vigorously a few times) to make sure there weren’t any glaring issues:
And since I was painting the new Saw Stand, I figured I might as well hit this one with a coat of paint. This, it would turn out, would be a mistake.
The keen eyed will notice 2 glaring omissions at this point (the point at which I thought I was done with this…). 1. There is no provision for the cable for the scales to pass through, and 2. There are no wheel stops. The commercial ones don’t usually have wheel stops, but they’re much shorter so were you to roll the car off of them, the likelyhood of them damaging the car is fairly low. These are very tall, and VERY strong. As such, should the car roll off of these, it would be ugly. I’ll address these next.
First up is a notch for the cable. Attempt number 1 was…. well… fugly. I tried doing it with and angle grinder and the results were bad.
It was at this point that the true value of a welder came into play. That was ugly enough that I decided to un-cut steel.
After a rethink and some consultation, I decided to use a hole saw instead. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, however at this point, with the frame fully assembled, it was a bit late in the game. This is by far the dumbest thing I’ve ever chucked up in the drill press, but damn if it didn’t work!
(I’ve no idea why this photo shows up sidewards. Click the picture for the right-side-up image)
Thankfully the results were most excellent. After a little cleanup of the sharp edges and corners with a flap disk, I was very happy.
Now that I know where the notch needs to go, subsequent cuts were FAR easier.
On to the tire stops. After a bit of figuring and evolutionary engineering, I ended up with an easy to fabricate, dead simple solution that will 1) stop the car rolling off the ends, and 2) still allow the stands to stack together to minimize the space they take in the shop.
Part the first is a 2″ length of 1/2″ OD tube welded in the center of each end of the frame:
Next is a 6″ length of 3/8″ steel rod, with a bend around the 2″ mark and a bullet nose ground in on each end. The bend is so that they won’t just fall through the tube, and it leaves a ~4″ step that would take an immense amount of force to get the tires over. If you figure out a way to do that, you do your alignments far more aggressively than I.
The short side / long side has an added advantage that I wish I could take credit for but in reality was a complete, but happy, accident. Up front, that long post interferes with the splitter when rolling the car back and forth between the scale and the roll off pad.
With it flipped upside down, there’s still plenty of a step to stop the car (plus the taller sides are still up at the rear), and the splitter clears easily. I love it when a plan, accidental or otherwise, comes together!
Many moons ago, a buddy posted a few pictures to Facebook of his car on some setup / alignment pads. My curiosity piqued, I reached out and got a bit more info from him, as something similar would be phenomenally useful. I’d looked at commercial options for these, but they are prohibitively expensive, and John’s homebuilt pads looked pretty close to what I wanted for a lot less money.
After a great deal of figuring and bouncing ideas off of engineer friends, it became clear that a set could be made that would also incorporate setup scales, for relatively little cash (and a great deal of time….so, so much time). Initial designs were drawn up and steel ordered.
What follows is going to be a boatload of photos of various stages of the build. It was a very very long process of evolutionary engineering and problem solving, but now that I know how to build them, additional sets will be made relatively (and it is very relative, because they’re a ton of work) easily.
First step: getting a bunch of steel home. I had various pieces cut more or less to length, as I didn’t know exactly how they would go together but had a general feel for at least what the long legs needed to be. The rest were cut to fit in the back of the truckster to get it home.
Lots of measuring (way more than twice), cutting, coping and beveling later, and the first frame was roughed out.
The scales will sit on the side with “floor” on all 4 edges, and the rolloff pads will go opposite them.
Cutting 45 degree miter joints would have been far easier from a fab standpoint. However coping the joints has 2 very big advantages: it leaves nice, flat areas on each end of the “long” side of the frame for the legs to sit on, and with that, there is a lot less strain on the welds and puts everything in compression, with the welds mostly holding the pieces together, and not supporting the weight of the car.
It’s not that I don’t trust my welds, but with something that needs to hold the weight of a car from crushing me to death, I will take every bit of added strength I can get.
A quick test fit was very encouraging. My measuring a dozen times lead to a fit that allows the scale pads to rock in and out easily, but not enough that they can move around too much.
Mocking up the legs:
Got the rest of the gussets and the horizontal supports done.
A design requirement was to have feet at each corner that will allow the full set to be leveled. The first step of that are these that make the bottom of the legs, with the threaded nut inside the leg. So, weld the nut to the washer, then weld that assembly to the leg.
The rest of the parts stackup.
This once again goes into the strength of the thing. Once the jam nut is tightened up, all of the load is on the big washers at the bottom of the legs and the bolt, and virtually none of the operating load is on the tack welds securing the nut on the inside of the legs.
With the basic design roughed out, we’ll work on the roll off pads in Part 2.
Prepared Miata 