1949 Chevrolet Gasser Rear Cross Member

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Arthur Lever’s project car for class work at The Hot Rod Institute in Rapid City, South Dakota. He wrote:

Now on to the rear cross member fabrication and the location of the rear axle with a four link system and track bar.

This is new to me and I had to sit down and draw it out. I want provisions to run an exhaust system should this vehicle ever want to end up on the street. It needs to be really strong as it holds the rear end in place and we will be pushing 500 HP, and we want to plant the HP to the ground so the geometry has to be right.

Now I get to move on to the rear end! Lots to do here.

To get started, I pressed the bearings onto the axle shafts and bolted them into the differential. As we did not know what gears to order (will wait on the dyno runs for HP), I created a slip tube to hold the insides of the axles in the correct location

With the bearings pressed onto the axle shafts, the next task was to weld up the bungs for the four link bars

Now that we know the drop angle of the engine, we know the proper angle of the pinion and the four link brackets can be welded to the axle tube

With the four link bars attached to the rear end, it is obvious they need to attach something

So the start of the cross member can be seen. With a mock up fifth member in place and the mock up engine in place I can string a string to find the location of the drive shaft. Note the holes in the cross member for a future exhaust system.

Ok, I have all the pieces and have lined everything back up to start putting them together

I made some templates for the driveshaft loop in the rear crossmember and cut out the steel

Cut the holes in the cross member for the sleeves. Cut to stop the cross member from being crushed when the bolts are tightened. Welded the sleeves in place.

The assembly starts. The top half will be welded together, the bottom half will remain bolted so that the driveshaft can be removed