The mocked up axle in the car
A view of the slicks mounted up on the mock axle
The rear axle of the Talon Wasn’t very hard to mock-up. The four-link bracketry had three inch holes in the middle of the four identical brackets for an axle tube. Well, as luck would have it, I had a three inch exhaust on the Talon previously that I had taken out of the car. The exhaust was getting pretty rough, being about five years old, so it wasn’t going to be going back on this Talon, or any DSM anyway. I broke out the Sawzall, and went to town on a large straight piece of former-exhaust-pipe. After I got that squared away, I took the four-link brackets, and persuaded them onto the mock-up axle. After that, we welded some flimsy little hubs onto it, complete with three bolts on each to hold the new wheels and slicks, and then placed it all in the car where we wanted the wheels to ultimately sit. Why’d we do this, instead of using a real axle? Weight and width. The real axle weighs considerably more than the mock up axle did, and would be a bit more unruly to work with trying to mock the rear suspension dimensions. That, and we didn’t have an axle to work with at the time. In addition to that stuff, we didn’t yet know how wide the axle needed to be, and a full width axle would have been far too wide.
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