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Old 04-01-2016, 08:22 AM
  #17550  
fredswain
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It's funny how things go back and forth. Cars have been going from trailing to inline to trailing for decades now. Each time one is touted an improvement over the other. Some may say that inline is more aggressive or that trailing is more stable. It's hard to describe it as our servos are so powerful that you could probably do something like leading steering and it would remain stable but built in geometric stability is the goal. Theoretically the more trail you have, the more stability you have. Look at your car from the side. Draw an imaginary line through the center of the outer hinge pin perpendicular to it and follow it until it touches the ground. How far rearward from this point to where the tire touches the surface is your trail.

If you have a car with no front kick angle and inline steering, it would have no trail. As you add front kick angle, you naturally get some trail from it alone. Adding trailing steering hubs only increases it more. Look at the wheels on a shopping cart. They trail and that cart has a tendency to go straight. An unfortunate side effect of trail is that it has a natural resonance. Ever seen a shopping cart wheel that keeps fluttering back and forth when a wheels isn't quite all the way on the ground? That's it. Fortunately we don't have that problem.

One thing you'll notice on our cars is that due to the front kick, when we steer left and right, the car also leans as the wheels turn. Unfortunately the car leans to the outside of the corner rather than the inside. The front of the car also physically moves left to right as the wheels are turned. Just turn the car on and while it's sitting still, turn the wheels and watch what happens to the car. Then play with different caster and trailing settings and look at what they do. This can at least show you what's going on. Describing how it feels is a bit tough. I currently have 4mm trail but typically prefer inline. For me this really comes down to fine tuning and feel rather than an actual performance change.
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