Saturday, 4 August 2007
Back on track...
OK, 24 hours later and things are looking a bit better. I've changed the design for the upright by rotating the mounting holes through 45 degrees and then sending spurs off in the right direction for the various attachments. I've also come to a decision about manufacturing. While the idea of machining the whole thing out of solid billet has great appeal, the inward spur on the upright for the top wishbone mounting is going to be the thick end of 80-100mm inside the rest of the upright. This means that were this to be made out of billet around 85% of the billet would be converted into swarf. It seems to make a lot more sense to have a multi-part upright so that anyone with a milling machine can make the bits cheaply. I need to do some analysis on the loadings but I imagine that a properly designed joint is going to be no weaker than the billet method, and will be quicker and easier to manufacture, and cheaper to boot.
I decided to extend the method to the brake calliper mounting as well, as you can see in the complete assembled upright. This has the added side effect that other callipers can be easily accommodated for the unit without having to design and build new uprights every time. Now everything fits together and doesn't clash. I just need to do some FEA work to make sure the upright is meaty enough (the Mk I eyeball says it is, but I want to see what sort of safety margin I have when I've got 1.5g of cornering acceleration, a bit of downforce and 1.5g of braking applied too) and isn't going to fail like a US road bridge at the first sign of abuse.
Once I've satisfied myself with that, the I can get back to SusProg and finish the front suspension geometry off. I definitely want the zero camber change in roll, combined with zero bump steer (SusProg can calculate the position for the steering rack for me to achieve this)
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