Chassis Balancing....
 

I just picked up HUDY's 107880....

http://www.hudy.net/products/setup/i...880_action.jpg

I tried it in both of my touring cars..the V-One R and the Impulse Pro....

The Impulse Pro seems to lean toward the left side a bit more.....

The V-One is steady right smack in the middle....

Both cars don't have any transponders attached to them when I did this.....

How critical is chassis balancing to the whole equation???

My personal opinion is that chassis balance is no big deal. Look at 1:1 cars for example. My RX7 handles brilliantly but the weight of that car is not centred. What the manufacturers do is to corner weight the car and adjust each spring/shock rate to ensure that the car puts equal weight on each wheel. The same principle can be applied to RC and your car will be perfectly corner weighted.

However WEIGHT DISTRIBUTION is much more important. You want the weight as low as you can get it, and as close to the centre of the roll axis as you can. The lower the weight the less roll the car experiences, and the more centred the weight the faster it will transition.

How are the above two things different? Well a chassis may be perfectly balanced left/right by say putting the engine to the far left and the tank/electronics to the far right, but the weight will be spread out a long way from the roll axis. This wil mean that the car will have no chassis tweak, but will transition poorly. Consider another car which has its weight lined up down the centre axis, but the chassis balance is a 1/2 inch to the left. You need to work on this car on a tweak gauge to slightly adjust the preloads on the shocks to get the corner weighting right, but once you have done this the car will transition correctly.

My point is you can correct chassis balance easy with weights or shock pre-load but the chassis weight distribution is much harder to correct.

Thank you for your input AMG...BTW what car do you race with??

I found a great site that goes through the dynamics of chassis tuning very well:

R/C Car Handling

Read on.....;)

I race a V1R which is a very well center weighted car as you said. Also as a bonus the car is almost perfectly centre balanced and therefore I never have to play with the tweak to get the car to run straight or corner well in both directions.

AMG...you got PM...

I cant see any :weird: :blush:

LOL.....Your mailbox is full AMG....;)

I was just going to ask you what dampening setup you have for your V-One R?? Shock oil ..springs etc....:D :D :D

I will clean it up :)

OK I run at a medium-high traction track with FAST foam tires, 42shore front and 40 rear. I use the V1RR front swaybar set on it lightest setting, gold springs and 50wt oil up front. I use the V1R gold swaybar, black spring and 50wt oil on the rear. This is very balanced and difficult to break loose without excessive understeer.

Thanks for the info AMG....;)