RcSchox
 

Interesting pistons. Can you please explain how these work. I had a look at your site but could not find any detailed info. I'd like to know what I to expect when trying out a new product. I have a Dex 410 that I would like to try them on.

Maybe, if not already done, make a new thread for your products. Then it will be easier to find what you are looking for.

Keep up the good work.

PS! Any pistons for the 1/8 Mugen MBX6 down the pipeline?

yes i have shims under the piston. i also already put 2mm of shims under front inner link
if you don't buy that triumph i would be interested in it,theres a vintage race coming up soon around me.

If you need a car for a vintage race I've got a XX that I have no plans for and would let go for cheap. It was and still is a great car. I just don't need six 2wd buggies lying around!

there is an explanation on the home page for now. i am working on a GIF that will show more detail. but in a nutshell the piston has two pcs, one is stationary with the shaft, the top one floats in the oil. when the shock is compressed both of them come together and the flow is limited to the top piston when the shafts goes into rebound flow is controlled via the bottom piston .

i have decided to not start my own thread but rather wait for a customer to start it and i will just chime in:nod: a few sets shipped out last week so i expect a thread to start sometime this week!

As far as the Mugen goes all i need is dimensions of the piston (in inches!) and i can make them, most of the 1/8 scale pistons are the same. i have a few sets of Dex410 pistons going out tomorrow, so expect some chatter about them soon!

Now if i can just convince Fred to move over to RCshox and blog!

Hmmm well then we need to move to the rear of the car, what dif oils are you running and what is your rear setup?

You never asked me to! Since I'm going to concentrate on my new car and leave the older ones for vintage races, I'll need some pistons for it. It uses Losi shocks. Do you want a Losi piston to copy the dimensions off of? You'll need one at some point anyways and I've got plenty. I've actually got a whole box full of shock bodies too.

Your first buggy was a Triumph? That's awesome! When that car came out I really wanted one. It was way ahead of the game. It's too bad Kyosho followed everyone else's design direction after it but then again the RB5 is more than capable as you well know. Kyosho is probably the most under appreciated company out there when it comes to 2wd and I don't know why. They make great cars.

only losi pistons i have are for the 22, just get a shock to me and i can make it. i will contact you about the blog sometime this week. Kyohso is smart in the sense that typicaly whats innovative doesnt sell that well. belt drive is superior to gears especially now with the power available. i think shaft drive is superior and i promise soon it will come back and change AGAIN!!

That Triumph gearbox (beltbox?) would be perfect for my mid motor car as everything would then rotate the same direction as the wheels. It would have some serious weight transfer under power. My car uses an idler gear between the pinion and spur gear as opposed to a 4 gear gearbox so even the slipper rotates the same direction as the wheels. If I had a belt system, only that little gear would counter rotate. That would be the perfect mid motor drivetrain.

I had a Schumacher Cougar 2 at the same time my brother had the Triumph and it was belt driven as well. Still got bits and pieces of that car. It had a method for adjusting rake in the front as well. Talk about innovative, that car was full of it. Absolute pain in the arse to work on though. That car had the smooth ball diff out of the box that I have ever encountered.

It's a shame that with several cars that have apparently had it that no one has learned how to take advantage of adjustable front rake.

I was so inspired by this thread and my results after following the "system",lol that I started a thread on shortcourse forums linking to this one. Getting lots of views already.

Got a link to that one?

just got an ultima pro,love my kyoshos but thank you, if anyone has some good bits for the pro i may be interested

its a short coarse so its a ball diff, all fresh. the rear is also shimed under the piston. the inner rear link has 1mm of shim and 2mm out on the hub. the truck is really good and easy to drive just thought id see if you guys had anything to make it really rip. The whole thought of raising the shock oil wt was to slow down the weight transfer. I could move the shocks out 1 more hole on the front arm. it jumps so perfect that the change may help enough in corners to offset a attitude change on jumps.

Here you go...http://www.rcshortcourse.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=23083

ended up taking aliitle weight out of the nose which helped alot. set up is super smooth. know if i could get the power delivery to stay consistent for 8 min i'd be very happy. motor got soft with about 2 min in the main. ended up 2nd and took tq.

Nice job, that's awesome! How much weight did you add to the truck and then subsequently take out?

We had talked about weight distribution a little bit earlier. Thinking about it I may have implied a 50/50 weight balance is best but the reality is that it isn't. My biggest concern is where the weight is and that the spring rate is matched for whatever weight you've got. For a 2wd, the number to shoot for is generally 35F/65R. It's a good average. I had said earlier, my old RC10 was about 28F/72R and with the motor behind the rear axle was an awful lot of weight way at the back. That's why adding weight to that car within the wheelbase improved it. The goal was to never get it to 50/50. The weight imbalance has led to a higher roll center in the rear and the use of a sway bar and a lower roll center being used in front with no sway bar. Each end is extremely different in setup but each end has an extreme weight difference from the other.

Incidentally I have since changed that car back to it's shorter arm stock suspension system and removed all weight and am retuning it to the stock setup. There are still lots of people running these vintage cars so I may as well develop a nice tune for it. The way I figure it I have six 2wd buggies anyways and all are a bit different. I may as well tune them all like they want to be tuned and then compare design differences. I want to see a tuning trend with the rear motor buggies and I'm hoping my mid motor will not follow that trend. It shouldn't.

Fred...have you ever written this stuff down in a diagram form? Like a troubleshooting diagram.

I have read and read the Hudy stuff but have found a lot of it to be untrue after reading this thread.

My SCTE truck handles so damn good right now....thanks for taking the time to post. I for one really appreciate it.

This is the only thing I've ever written down about it. It's in my head. I'm definitely not disagreeing with the technical books on the subject but there are some websites out there that have the info reversed. Sadly if you do a search about suspension tuning you are pretty likely to find one of them.

I do a few things different than most do and they are things that are unique to rc due to the amount of adjustability we have, or can have. I think of every component as having one job and one job only which means whatever tuning needs we have gets narrowed down to certain things depending on what handling issues we want to fix. I could never get a trouble shooting guide made because it would only work if you had a properly tuned car. I also believe that we don't tune around our driving style (I hate when people say that) but rather tune around what the particular vehicle we are working on wants in accordance to the track it is being run on. We then adapt our driving style to what it wants. Fine tuning is more of a feel thing and that's where you can tune to your preferences. The only reliable way to tune any car to any particular driving "style" is if you prefer to drive cars that handle like crap. You can nail that one every single time and many people do. A big problem is that people think they should be adjusting to what they want rather than what the car wants. Doesn't everyone want a good handling vehicle? If what you want is outside the physical capabilities of the vehicle, what you want is unattainable so you'd better adapt to what you can get.

FredSwain,

How do you apply these balancing principles to a touring car? Do you just push down on the center of the car and watch what the suspension does? Do you accommodate for tweak after you spring balance the car? How do you know what kind of dampening (shock oil) to use?

Thanks,

Jiu

A touring car is going to have much less suspension travel and a much higher effective spring rate. The same techniques apply but they may be extremely difficult to observe on a touring car without using slowed down video of the tests.

i run 1.5 oz in front and rear,the rear is right behind the battery in the center so's not to slow down left right transition to much. The front is a little more spread out. .5 under bulkhead,.5 under the rack and .25 on each side of the servo. i only removed .25 under front bulkhead. it was right before the main and i didnt want to make a big change as the truck was pretty good. just wanted to see if i was going in the right direction. by the way setting up like this seems to work from 1 track to the next,meaning i dont really have to make any big changes. and i've been going from outdoor to indoor.

wish i could afford a set of those pistons to try out,want to sponsor me at nats? lol

Once the car is balanced and setup well, changes from track to track are going to be small and maybe only certain things need to be changed a little bit and other things left alone. That's the brilliance of it. If you go to a new track and the car turns well but needs a little more dampening, just change the shock oil. There is no need to drastically change it all from track to track. If you need to do this then it's a good sign that you didn't have a good setup to begin with.

I was looking at my RC8 and noticed that there are 2 options to place the steering links on the steering draglink. I assume this adjusts bump steer. How can I apply this to tuning? Also there are spacers on the front hub where the upper suspension arm mounts. Are these to adjust caster? Lastly I cant figure out how to adjust front roll center on the RC8.

The RC8 only has 2 options for front roll center adjustment. The inner end of the upper link is fixed. The outer end on the hubs has 2 locations, an inner and outer hole. The outer hole is the lower roll center. Fortunately the rear has 3 options on the inside but I'm not sure how many on the outside.

Remember to use your sway bars. If you need more roll stiffness at one end, you can either use sway bars or higher roll centers. Or both of course if necessary.

If you've got spacers on the arms then you can probably adjust your wheelbase a little bit. This affects balance and handling too.

The 2 different mounting options on your steering probably coincide with the upper arm mounting positions. If you have a spacer behind the upper arm on the mount that has the upper arms mounted forward then you'll probably want to run the front steering hole. If you've got the upper arm spacer mounted in front of the upper arm then you'll probably want to run the back steering hole. This probably does have the effect of changing front end caster.

These are only a guess as I don't have an RC8. The B4 however does have a similar feature on the steering so I'm assuming AE used a similar adjustment on that car.

When using sway bars is there a way to tell if I have a sway bar that is to thick? Do sway bars have the same handling affect as roll centers like a thicker sway bar is like a higher roll center?

This is actually why I don't like using the term "roll center". It gets confusing. The only relevant concept is roll rate stiffness. You are correct though. A higher "roll center" is more roll rate stiffness just as a thicker sway bar is greater roll rate stiffness.

I prefer to adjust the camber links first to see if I can get the car handling where I want it with them before I get to sway bars even though a sway bar has a larger effect on roll rate stiffness. The reason being that a sway bar is adding suspension stiffness as the car rolls. It does not change dampening. By using the camber links first, you are putting more control of roll stiffness on the suspension itself and not the shocks/springs. The spring rate to dampening rate remains the same. If we add sway bars we increase spring rate during lean in relation to dampening. Sway bars don't add dampening.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing but too much of anything isn't good either. Don't be afraid to use them though. There isn't really any good answer too too thick or too thin. It's what the car wants.

fredswain, in your opinion whats the benefit if any, to rear toe in, and whats the difference of gaining toe in with hubs compared to on the rear suspension pivot.

Is there a diffrent effect to changing the roll center at the hubs verses changing it at the tower?

Keep it coming guys this has been some great information, I was working on my spring frequency test this morning, and my front is lot faster than the rear. If i'm correct you would want to slow down the front to match the rear and use a softer spring. I have the softest spring on the front my truck now, I moved the top of the shock to the inside position on the tower and to the outer hole on the arm. Would it be correct to install a harder spring on the rear to match the frequency of the front.

Fred...have been working on truck since reading this thread. I have dropped a full second avg. of lap times...which I was stuck at for mths. before tuning truck the right way......now I understand it could be me getting better, but I really feel without setting up truck properly it was holding me back.

It handled great and I was able to do things that I could not before. This stuff works and for me works great.

Thanks again for taking the time.

I think you are probably going to need to stiffen up the rear. Not that a light spring in the front is necessarily bad. I think one of the things that folks are going to find is that in order to keep the car from porpoising they need to run a stiffer rear spring than they would have normally thought.

Triumph
 

This Triumph is going to drive me insane. The springs are tuned. The damping is good, probably not great yet. Still working on that. But the handling is awful. When you get off the gas coming into a turn the car hooks pretty hard to the point where its tough to control. If you get back on the gas AT ALL during the turn, the car pushes like a battle ship. I've tried lowering the rear roll center figuring just getting the push consistent from corner entry to corner exit was a good place to start but I'm not making enough head way. I looked at the rear end of the car and noticed that there was some anti-squat built in to the stock configuration for this car. Looks like quite a bit too. Is it possible that the problems I am having are because there is a ton of anti-squat? If not, how should I proceed?

as far as sway bars are concerned, how do change the feel of the sway bars..ie: locked down vs not locked down? what do you change on the end link to achieve a change in feel?

ar eyou running ball diff or gear diff?

Its a ball diff. You thinking its a bit too tight? I'll check that out tomorrow. I did just rebuild the diff but it was like this before the rebuild as well.

On the anti-squat front, I chopped up an old fiberglass shock tower to make a shim for the rear arm mounts. Looks like it has about 0 degrees now. That would have made the original kit configuration about a poop-ton of anti-squat. It was too dark to try it out after I was done so we'll have to check that tomorrow too.

the way i understand it is u NEVER want to lock down the swaybar it should pivot freely, as for adjusting the end link, the more the bar is pushed into the endlink the stiffier it will become.


TRIUMPH----- are you running an esc with alot of drag break in it? And are you spring collars equally turned down, both rears should be close and both fronts should be close. I like to use a tweak bar to be sure the car is dispusing the load equally. Does the buggy launch straight and jump flat side to side

I was out of town in San Antonio over the weekend so I haven't been around to respond.

In regards to the Triumph, when you say you get off the gas and it hooks really hard, are you referring to the back end wanting to come around?

The on power understeer I get. You need lots more roll stiffness in the rear and/or lots less in the front. Remember a higher roll center is more, a lower roll center is less. A sway bar also adds roll stiffness. What you'll find is that when you get this dialed in well you'll probably have the back end come around hard when on the brakes. Reduce the front end rake. There is too much weight transferring forward. If you can't completely get rid of the effect then you need to dial out some of the brake on the transmitter. If you are only making small adjustments in the camber links, you are only going to get small differences in the handling. Start with the roll center in front about as low as you can get it and run a pretty high roll center in the rear with much shorter camber links. When weight is very unevenly distributed such as a rear motor car, the roll stiffness needed will also seem very uneven. We need far more roll stiffness if there is far more weight. The front is much lighter than the rear so it needs far less roll stiffness.

A diff that is too loose is going to turn into the corner well but then lose it midway through or on the way out. A diff that is too tight will not turn into the corner well but will help you pull through the exit of the corner on power.

A sway bar should not move right to left is possible. It should rotate freely. If there were no links connected to the ends of it, it should fall down in it's own and not bind.

Next time you come to SA, bring your toy and run with us. We start at 7 on saturdays and are usually done by midnight. It's a great group and 1/8 buggy is on fire with sportsman, expert, and and electric class. We also run SC 2wd and 4wd as well as Truggy. We had 6 heats last weekend.