Sunday, August 29, 2010

Spoke w/ a Unisport distributor

Well I just had the pleasure of talking to a Unisport distributor who was there at the end of the company. He said total production reached about 1500 kits before the 70's economy and a large stock of improperly stored firewalls took the last of the company's resources. Apparently the machine shop making the forward firewalls - the 1/4" steel plates that mounted the linear actuators & centered the tilting parallelogram & steering & lined up the frame, pretty much the linchpin of the design - at the end of production was storing them leaning at an angle instead of stacked flat. A slight bend started showing up and finished cars were wearing out tires quickly. The expense of dealing w/ this problem was the straw that broke the camel's back.

The linear actuators are military issue, from airplane landing gear (sorry not sure which plane), and even have a clutch that's plated off here:



I haven't had much time for the project this summer, but now I have a line to the original circuit diagrams and build manuals - once I've got them I'll get as much info online as I can, & I'll have an easier time replacing the broken old switches.