My manufacturing partner came up with the idea of combine reservoirs for packaging reasons. Instead of having individual reservoirs for each damper, he wanted a 'front' reservoir and a 'rear' reservoir on the basis that it's easier to route pipes around an engine bay than to find homes for two large reservoirs.
Now this idea has a couple of distinct advantages. The first is that if we keep the combined reservoir vertical and large enough, we won't need to gas pressurise the fluid at all which will make life inordinately easier for the end user, although there would be an increased risk of cavitation. If you do decide to pressurise, it'll be a lot easier to bleed air out of the system with a single reservoir at the highest point of the hydraulic circuit.
The second advantage came to me a little later. When the car rolls there will be effectively no change in the working volume of the dampers as what goes down on one side will go up on the other. Only when the suspension pitches or heaves will there be a change in the volume. Now, if we replace the gas spring with a stack of belleville washers, then we're effectively adding an extra spring which only works in heave. If we restrict the flow into the reservoir we also have extra controllable damping of that heave motion.
So the rendering above is a revised system that does just that... those out there who like lateral thinking might like to consider what would happen if we connected the dampers diagonally rather than side-to-side. And if you're really interested check out this link for some Spaniards who've been doing pretty much the same thing.
There... that looks a little prettier than the original 'let's take a big hunk of billet and turn most of it into swarf' valve block. All it needs is a pair of pipes to connect it to the cylinder and we'll have a working damper. I've change the design slightly in that instead of using a hex and a slot to do the adjustment, we just have nicely knurled knobs..
As in all these things, the devil is in the details and I've just spent a useful hour best part of a morning making sure these things can actually be built and put together. There's nothing quite like realising that your O-rings will never seal because the bore is too large or you can't actually insert the springs and valve seat into the canister because the hole is too small. For those without a copy of thread tables and the like to hand, I can thoroughly recommend the RoyMech website (http://www.roymech.co.uk) as somewhere to find all those useful little diagrams and measurements.
Anyway, just got the last parts of the other half to sort and then the tedious job of creating engineering drawings for manufacture.
Although I've still got 4-way adjustment (high and low speed bump and rebound), there's still going to be times when there isn't enough adjustment available within the bleed and blow-off valves to match into the car. So, instead of the solid piston and through rod design of the original, the picture above is of a standard shim valve and orifice piston. This will be the ultimate determining factor for high speed damping - which gives the option of using the high speed adjusters to control the 'knee point' of the damping curve.
Virtually every damper uses shim valves somewhere along the line as, although they're horrendously non-linear (although a quick study of the various text books will give the suitable formulae - sadly the IMechE site is down at the minute, so I can't tell you if it's in Roarkes or not) they're a nice consistent non-linear, which needle valves tend not to be. The disadvantage is that, other than by supplying a pre-load (and a lot of cheaper dampers provide adjustment this way), you can't change the characteristics except by cracking the damper open and changing the shim diameters, stacking arrangements and thicknesses. For a top end damper, you often get a choice of 30 different shims to build into your stack, which gives an eye-watering number of options and excessively long times spent playing with the damper dyno trying to get the characteristics you want.
The basic design is still going to be twin tube, with all the flow passing through the valve block. The problem with this is that as the damper moves in and out the volume of the working chamber decreases and increases. Now hydraulic fluid is not renowned for it's compressibility, so we need a reservoir to hold this extra fluid. In 'proper' twin tube dampers, the annular ring around the working chamber does the task, but I want these dampers to work irrespective of orientation - the classic way of telling that a twin tube is a twin tube is to invert it, pump air into the working chamber and feel the lack of damping that occurs. So we'll need a second floating piston somewhere, with a gas pressure chamber on the other side.
Gas pressure can be a useful thing, in that you can use it to support some of the weight of the car and you get a slightly (more if you don't have a big enough chamber for the gas) rising rate as well. WNTL? It's another non-linearity which may need tuning, and I don't have huge amounts of free time...
OK, so I got a price back from my tame manufacturing partner for the design of the six way adjustable damper which made my eyes water a little and, notwithstanding the fact that it was for an engineering one-off, even with economies of scale wouldn't really be viable in the sense of being able to sell it to any target group other than rich idiots.
So we're off on a voyage of discovery into how to make something cheaper. The first thing to go is the plethora of adjusters. I'd envisaged lots of precision drilled barrels which would give consistence between units. Of course if you take a cylindrical component that can be turned out a huge rate and then have to carefully mount them in a dividing head and drill 16 holes (8 for the indexing mechanism and 8 different sized ones for the orifices) in exact positions, then it's going to cost a lot more to build one. If you're building thousands then you sort out jigs and fixtures, but I can never foresee this being a mass production item, not matter how bling it is...
Now, I still want separate adjustability of high and low speed damping at a sane price, so that I can take a unit off the shelf and valve it for most applications. If we can't have miniature drilled orifices to squeeze hydraulic fluid through, then we'll need a needle valve that you can screw in and out to change the size of the orifice. Not as repeatable and you'll need a damper dynamometer (a few thousand pounds) to do setup.
High speed adjustment will be similar to the original design... OK, so a short CAD session later we have mark II of the adjustment valving:
I've shrunk the component count down from eight individual bits down to three (not including the coil spring and various sealing O-rings) and there's no nasty indexing and drilling required. With the exception of an exhaust hole in the blue component and the hex adjuster on the top, it's all lathe manufacture and thus reasonably rapid (and hopefully cheap)
Away from the tiny precision bits, I'm rationalising the design of the main body. Instead of having a massive boring job, I'll use standard off the shelf tubes interfacing with turned caps. Minimal cost, and bar a few threads, no machining. It'll all be fine...
has been blowing through this blog for far too long. I could blame pressures of work (somehow I've ended up with four jobs at the same time) or the fact that some of my creativity has gone commercial. Anyway, the pretty picture above is one of the fruits of all that labour.
One of the four jobs has been developing suspension kits for various people. The problem with doing this is that you often have to make do with whatever a damper manufacturer has sent you, particularly in terms of adjustability. Sometimes you get lucky and you can get the dampers set exactly how you want them and other times you just can't get the rates you want.
So, in finest engineer fashion (i.e. slag off the competition, insist you are the only person on the Earth who can actually do the work properly... have no dress sense or sense of rhythm), I've decided to fill my gap by designing a damper to work just the way I want it. I've even got a manufacturing partner lined up, which is a degree of organisation I'm not renowned for.
So, quick run down of the features:
1) It's a through rod damper. Virtually all dampers aren't, so as the piston moves into the body, the shaft it's attached to changes the working volume, which has to be accommodated. Two common methods are employed. Either you have a second concentric chamber as a reservoir (a twin-tube damper) or you have a second piston with a gas spring to one side which can be compressed to take up the slack (a monoshock). This one has the piston in the middle of the shaft and a seal at each end of the working chamber. As the piston moves, there is no change in working chamber volume. Very useful as it means the design can work on low pressures and therefore react quicker to changes in velocity. It also means that the seals can be off the shelf O-rings and DIN seals.
2) No internal valves. The attractive block bolted to the side carries all the valves. So if you want to change something fundamental, you don't have to strip the whole thing down, you can simply depressurise the unit and swap the valves about. Fluid can only flow from one side of the piston to the other via the valve block. This means you get a large flow of fluid and it's far easier to control a large flow than it is a small one.
3) No shims. Commonly, dampers use thin sheets of metal blocking holes at provide the damping force. These tend to be horrendously non-linear. This makes tuning an interesting affair and lots of rebuilding tends to go on. I've engineered this using simple tappet valves and adjustable orifices.
4) Six way adjustment. OK, this is probably overkill. As well as controlling the gradient of the Force-velocity curve in high and low speed situations, you can adjust the knee point where the two curves switch over. All of that adjustment comes without stripping down valves, which makes it ideal for someone with very little time. Of course having six different knobs to twiddle makes it a nightmare for someone with no idea what they're doing.
I've also tried to make the unit as manufacturable as possible. Similar units from Koni and Ohlins retail at around £500 each, and I'm trying to get the price point to something around 40% of that and if any machine shop with a CNC mill and lathe can churn these out in their thousands, then I'm laughing.
In finest bottom up design methods, I'm starting at the end and working my way forwards. The nicely rendered bit above is the output shaft for the reversing box. It'll sit coaxially with the input shaft (hence the big hole in the middle) and can be driven two ways. The first (and most common) way will be for dogs to engage in the slots on the front and drive the output shaft directly. These dogs will be on a sliding collar splined to the input shaft. In this fashion there will be a non-geared direct connection between engine and output shaft.
The second way will be for a gear to turn the output shaft. If we take the drive from the input shaft via a pair of gears to a layshaft and then via two extra gears to the gear on the output shaft then we'll reverse the direction of travel of the output shaft relative to the input shaft and hey presto - reverse gear. Now given that bike engines tend to major more on power (by virtue of stratospheric rev limits) than torque, a degree of speed reduction (and hence torque multiplication) might well be a good thing as the driver won't need to necessarily slip the clutch mightily to get the thing moving in reverse.
Now for all this to work with a minimum of nasty mechanical graunching noises, all the gears will have to be in constant mesh. This will mean that the gear on the input shaft must float and only be connected when we want reverse gear. If we use the other end of the sliding collar to do the connect then we have a workable design. Everything else is metallurgy and calculations...
I know it's been a bit of a while but somebody pressed my 'get a life' button again and I've changed jobs (while still teaching as well) and a home (re)construction project has been filling what is euphemistically termed spare time. Never mind, I'm back now and I suppose I had better get on with some non-paying real work.
One of the requirements for RGB racers is a working reverse system, something that the majority of bikes (and all bikes if you don't class a Honda Goldwing as a motorcycle) don't seem to have fitted. If you've gone for a longitudinal installation of your engine then it's relatively easy to have an extra gearbox between output cog and differential. Unfortunately, I seem to have plumped for a mid-engine layout which makes for a much simpler differential layout (using chain and sprockets just like the donor bike) but does hamper the ability to go backwards under the influence of the engine. A lot of racers use a second starter motor acting on the drive chain but these seem to have a relatively large failure rate (and failure when tested is an automatic disqualification) not to mention issues with how the torque is delivered. The fact that I'm a mechanical engineer rather than an electron herder seems to be pushing me down a purely mechanical option.
So knocking out a quick specification for a black box, I get the following list of desirable features:
- Lightweight and compact
- User switchable between forward and reverse
- Minimal transmission losses in forward mode
And that's about it... I'm still at the brain storming stage but I can envisage a system that is basically the reverse gear and top gear from an old gearbox. With one of these you have direct drive from input to output in forward mode and a small geartrain in reverse.
