Thought I forgot, didn’t you! Did you forget what we’re talking about? Check out this page for part 1. In this installment we’ll look at construction of the sub-frame which supports the PTO drive shaft between the PTO output and the rear of the Jeep. Although I ordered some of the parts from a catalog, a lot of the linkage at the transfer case was done with junked axle parts.
Here’s what it looked like assembled in my living room:
Basically it’s a ladder-style construction using pillow bearings to support the shaft to the rear of the Jeep.
Below is a photo of the mock-up temporarily installed on the Jeep. At this point I had yet to determine the length of drive shaft to connect from the PTO output flange on the transfer case to the sub-frame shaft. For the PTO flange, I made a circular ¼” thick steel plate with four bolt holes (to match the PTO flange) with a 1″ hole in the middle. A 1″ shaft then fit through the plate and into a yoke from a (spare) Dana 25 axle. The Dana 25 yoke has an ID (in the splines) that is just larger than 1″, so the 1″ shaft fit through it. The whole mess (1/4″ plate, shaft and yoke) were welded together. Then the rear drive shaft from a 1979 CJ7 (with an automatic trans & Quadratrac t/c) connected the PTO flange-yoke to another yoke (from a dead Dana 18 t/c) on the 1″ sub-frame shaft.
Did ya get all that?
You will notice that I had a problem with the flexible rear brake line. At this point, the brake line was just pushed out of the way (at its limit), and it was fine for making ice cream in the driveway, but later I relocated the hard line to allow for freedom of travel for the flex line for off road use. The subframe and shafts are permanent installs, so everything still needed to work well for off-roading. The sub-frame was later painted, but at this point I wanted to make sure the whole thing worked before it was made pretty.
Here’s a couple more pics from the mock-up stage:
In this one you can see better detail on how I connected the shaft to the PTO output as described above:
And although the photo below is blurry, at the end of the sub-frame shaft, still under the Jeep, there is quick disconnect to mate the 1″ smooth shaft to a 1-3/8″ 6 spline PTO shaft. This way the PTO shaft is removable to keep from getting the shaft hit when off road.
Finally, the rear bumper was modified to allow the PTO shaft to pass through the top of the bumper, and the receiver hitch was added as a support point for the ice cream bucket frame. At this point the receiver hitch is not yet fully supported; that came later. Again, the point was to be able to simply test the ice cream maker.
In the final installment, we’ll look at the linkage to the ice cream maker.