Originally Posted by
protc3
I must say that i am about certain i am going try this buggy out as it is a very nice piece of work. My question is, How are you checking balance with shocks on the car? That is simply checking the tweak. If the spring rates are not dead equal on each wheel, or if the ride height is slightly different at each wheel, It throws the whole test off. The only way to fix this is to eliminate the shocks all together and use identical length tie rods in place of the shocks. This will make the scales measure the actual weight bias and not take spring variation into the mix.
Off this topic, I feel your pain on the instruction manuals. They are a pain in the ass. What i did for the release of my last 2 cars was i had my wife, who has absolutely no interest what so ever in RC build them.
Needless to say, it took a while. Good luck with the car. Im sure you will see an order from me in the near future for one. I will say that i do love my Serpent car so its going to have to share the pit table.
I definitely see your point and agree that ride height and spring pre-load will alter the balance of the car. Finding the static balance is very useful in car design. We balanced the car initially in software without any effects of springs or ride height. That was the base line. But we think it's more informative to weigh and balance an actual setup that we are running. You can influence the scales with ride height and pre-load but you can kind of see in the pics that we didn't simply twist the shock collars to get better numbers as they are even.
Here's how the photos went down - I was running my car on the track. I thought, "Wow, my car is running really good right now. I really need to write another blog post!" I took the car off the track, put it on the scales and snapped the pictures you see in our article. I was amazed at how well our virtual concept matched the real thing.
We didn't measure each wheel in the computer (not sure how to do that actually), but rather the left/right and front/rear. However, we moved stuff around until we got everything where we wanted while being very careful to put opposing weight on either side at the closest possible longitudinal positions. We did this specifically to avoid the heavy wheel / light wheel issues we were seeing with the nitro converted layouts at the time.
But yeah, maybe later down the road someone will put some static links in there to see how it balances out without the shocks on there.