Stewart #26 Speedometer Swivel Drive Mount

I have determined that I can make a simple bracket to mount the Stewart Speedometer Swivel Drive onto the right spindle axle. I mocked up the bracket with a piece of wood to verify my thoughts, making sure that I would have clearance from the M16 Acorn Nut that holds the king pin for the spindle axle. (I didn't take any pictures of the mockup -- it was rather ugly made from a paint stirrer wooden stick). Below I have clamped the bracket to the spindle axle so that I could transfer the locations of the mounting holes/slots. At the end of this posting I have provided a link to the drawing of the bracket that I had made at a local machine shop for those interested.

I used a punch to make a dimple in the steel spindle axle and then drilled a 1/8 inch hole just shy of the depth or thickness of the spindle. I didn't want a through hole. I then chased this hole with a 5.0mm diameter drill bit for tapping a M6(1.0) thread.

Once I had one hole tapped, I again mounted my swivel bracket with a 6mm bolt and transferred the location of the second slot (my clamp was in the way to transfer both slots at once) and repeated my drilling procedure and tapped the second M6(1.0) thread. I always get nervous tapping a blind hole in particular. You don't want to snap off a tap and then figure our how to remove it. I took my time making sure I cleared out the chips as I went along hopefully preventing the tap from binding up and breaking. And as you can see the two tapped holes below were completed without incident.

Obviously you have to mount the Stewart Swivel Bracket onto the Swivel Drive first, then place the drive gear onto the shaft and then feed the cotter pin into the drive gear slot through the cotter pin hole. "Back in the day" this was all they used to fix the drive gear to the swivel drive -- not something I would think to do today, but it works.

Finally everything mounted and aligned.

And a video clip of the gears doing their thing. The rubbing sound you may hear is from the disc brake pad dragging a little on the disc.

In a future post I will show the details of making the drive cable that goes from the Swivel Drive to the Stewart #26 speedometer that will be mounted on the dash or floor board. That won't happen for a while.

Click here for the Speedometer Swivel Drive Bracket Drawing.