as long as the bolts are torqued to spec, the force will be in tension, not shear. the clamping force of the mount on the spacers and the spacers on the shock rod end is what is holding you together. if that bolt ever loosens up enough to loose clamp, then the force becomes shear on the bolt and thats when you run into problems.
its the same way Control arm joints work. hopefully, if the bolt loosens up, you will hear it moving around before it breaks.
I would not be worried about the mount tearing, but a bit more bracing would ease everyone's minds :clap:
I'm gonna save that last part for future :wave: reference
Take it to its illogical conclusion and you'll see what I'm getting at. Suppose you have two mounting ears, one foot apart, with the coilover in between them, and a 14" long bolt and two ~5" spacers centering the coilover between the mounting ears.
Now put a force on the coilover. That damn bolt is going to bend more than it would if the mounting ears were right next to the coilover, given the same tension on the bolt, and thus the same torque on the bolt (assuming the same thread pitch and diameter, etc.)
I'm probably using all the wrong terms, but basically my point is, you want the mounting ears to be as close as possible to the point the load is applied at, and the bolt therefore to be as short as possible. The longer the spacers get, the more tension you are going to need on the bolt to keep the deflection to the same amount, and at some point you're going to need to go up a size and use thicker spacers because the leverage (almost certainly the wrong term, some kind of bending moment maybe?) will result in the spacer crushing or the bolt stretching instead of the force being applied to the mounting ears. When that happens, the bolt will bend sideways instead of being under shear.
i couldnt picture a good way of doing a shock hoop and fastening it to the sheetmetal remotely easily. the reasoning for doing it like this was to spread the load over a few feet of the uniframe. i figured the large frame stiffener piece would keep it from ripping upwards, and the side plates would help keep that piece from flexing in either direction. it would have to rip several feet of weld on each side in order to fail since it's welded inside and outside on every joint.
it wasnt really to keep the engine bay clean or anything, it just seemed to be the most simple way of doing it given my equipment and ability, and i have the rear done similarly and that's been working fine so far. plus space is a bit of a premium and this didnt require changing much other than the air box.
that was my thoughts anyways when designing it, what it'll do may be another story, i'm not a mech engineer either
it's got double shear tabs inside welded to the top plate. the side holes are only for access. the bolts are like 2.5" long, using the standard misalignment spacers that come with the shocks.
I'd definitely put angle iron all the way around the top plate and probably some stiffening ribs across the plate as well, then, especially if the double shear tabs don't extend all the way to the box walls or aren't full welded to them at their ends. What I'm picturing is kinda like what the U-bolt plate shock tabs RuffStuff sells, which also have the benefit of adding stiffness to the U-bolt plate.
http://www.ruffstuffspecialties.com/catalog/SPLT-KIT.html
Everything else seems fine enough to me, but again I'm not a mechanical engineer, I'm an EE :eyes: I'm going on what my gut tells me is gonna happen here.
e: rockclimber, while I am honored
gee
to have found my way into your signature, might I suggest you keep it to under 4 lines? You're currently at 10 lines on my screen, you can easily cut that down to 3 or 4 if you just manually url-ize the quotes to point to the correct posts rather than using quote tags.
