From the FORD shed

Straightening a Bent Front Axle

It all started when my friend Dave Knutson removed the front axle from his 1922 Model TT truck to paint it and found it was bent. It appears that the driver’s side must have been impacted at some time. We inquired of several people as to what one should consider when attempting to straighten a T axle but, the suggestions were quite varied. Someone said heat it, another said never heat it, others said just keep hitting it with a big hammer. One thing we knew for sure was that the axle should be straightened cold. After sleeping on this for a night I came up with the idea to use a log splitter. It’s got a 25 ton ram… that should be more than sufficient. As you can see in photos 1, 2, and 3 we have the axle set in our jig ready to bend. The jig is a 4x4 oak beam from a pallet with two 2 ½” blocks screwed to it. Photo 4 shows the business end of the ram. We used a machinist V block to prevent damage to the axle. We also engaged the help of Dave’s wife Cheryl to operate the hydraulic ram while we each held one end of the axle on the fixture. Photo 5 shows the actual bending. Note the yellow string we used as a gauge. The axle was initially ¾” out of line. We had to “over-bend” the axle by about 1” because when we released the ram, the axle would spring back. Photo 6 shows the straightened axle. We felt so confident that we took the wishbone that had a slight bend in it and straightened it also on the first attempt.

Redneck Engineering

Harlan Pilon/Dave Knutson