Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Morgan Three Wheeler & Super 3 A synopsis of my work on the Centa coupling etc.

One suspects there is an unanswered suggestion in Morgan's in-tray dating from 1937 that they consider a double wishbone instead of sliding pillar for front suspensions...

Kudos to Phil's R&D here. Centa improvements and proper BB mount would be my favourites for adding to my car!

That's disappointing, but not surprising. Perhaps some who have connections on this forum could provide a poke into Malvern. One would think they would want to engage with an enthusiastic user community who are doing development work on their product for free...

In any event, put me down for a set also!

In my communications with Pete Larsen a couple years ago, he indicated that on his Liberty Ace he used a smaller pressure plate/clutch assembly, around 8" as I remember. He also used the T-5 series transmission, although there are many variants of that series. He did not state how he coupled the motor with the flywheel clutch assembly.

Went to the Park it in the Market event at Greenwich market this evening.

I spoke to Stuart from Krazyhorse, who further enlightened me on the events that lead to the poly inserts failing. The main reason is the amount of heat build up in the coupling and not the quality of the inserts.

John.

Phil, fantastic work and blog. Please add me to your list.

Thanks for that John. I will try to monitor temperature through the gap where the steering rack passes. I wonder if the temperature build up is due to the round inserts moving about so much and causing heat by friction?

Just returned from a 500 mile round trip and still all is performing well. Your responses have been sufficient to warrant tooling up for moulded polyurethane inserts and design work is underway. Thanks everybody for your confidence. My summers are busy with music exhibitions etc. so it may be a few months before they are ready but I will get production of a batch of kits started immediately.

Phil,

I've read your blog several times and have paid close attention to the new urethane inserts.

I know that on the ones you have, you had to hand cut/form them. If you had a cad drawing of the profile in .dxf, you might want to look up your local fab shop that has a water jet. We have an OMAX that we use to cut urethane nest tooling for the plastics blown bottle industry. We cast the nests from liquid urethane and then do our flash profile cut with the water jet. We have a .5" thick aluminium back and we cut through that and then on through up to 4" of urethane.

Our OMAX also had what they call a "tilt-a-jet" head. This allows up to 9 degrees of jet path tilt. As anyone knows that's ever cut thicker metal with a cutting torch, the torch tends to lag behind on the thicker metal. The water jet does the same thing and we can adjust the head angle to compensate for it.

I'm not sure, but the rubber rods look to be around 100mm long. This should be well within the range of most water jets.

Rather than making a mold and messing with the mixing etc, maybe having them cut from a sheet of urethane would be more cost effective for you.

At worst, spend a little time and look into it.

Keep up the great work on the M3W, great reading!

Has molding been looked in to for reproduction? I've done work with products from smooth-on both molding and pouring. They have pretty much any shore hardness imaginable.

Once a good mold is established though, it would be pretty much a garage shop pour and repeat. Though probably some vacuum degassing and pressure curing depending on what formula is used.

Just another thought. It would also allow for testing in a variety of hardness inserts.

The only thing that I've noticed over the years of lower durometer urethane is that when hot and high humidity, it gets REALLY soft like modeling clay. Now this take a couple years to happen, but I've had urethane .25" sheet in some storage drawers at home and when I took them out they were all sticky and soft.

I'm no expert and I would guess there are some mixes that won't degrade like the softer stuff I've seen.

The urethane that we use has little shrink, but it's 90d hardness. WAY TOO HARD for the use here. It does seem to be holding up over the years though.

Cast, once designed, would be simple and cheaper, but I'm not sure that I would say that I have a perfect mix when I pour, but good enough for my use. Also a 3-gallon mix that we use is almost $800. I just thought that if you bought a sheet from a manufacturer that you would be pretty much guaranteed of a consistent repeatable end product.

It will be interesting to see if the more of the rubber ones fail. I would think that "some" strategic cooling holes in the adapter housing could help dissipate some of the heat build up.