Originally Posted by
Nerobro
I appreciate the reply. But saying "go read a 29,000 post thread" is bordering on rude. At the rate of 1 post every 5 seconds, we're talking 40 hours of reading.
Add into that the time it takes to digest and decide if a post is coherent, useful, and worth cross checking... well I do have a day job, and these are toy cars. :-)
This is assuming you're not trying to be sly about saying "take a long walk off a short pier."
I've done both from time to time depending on my mood that day...
Anecdotally, shimming my front and rear hubs, and my front knuckles removed some of the unpredictability I was having, and lead to having more control when things did start to get squirrelly. I suspect the shims on the knuckles had little to do with it, but the better wheel control did.
If shimming is causing unpredictability, that makes things sound like binding to me, I wonder if under load things are flexing enough to make things bind up when they're shimmed up on the bench. I've seen many projects where people with my obsessive slant take things a step to far, and things go very crosswise. eg: Projects never get finished, because they're not perfect. Things get tuned to the edge, so close, that they spend most of their time ~over~ said edge. Or the best example, the triumph motor, built to all of the "good side" of factory tolerances, ending up so tight that it can't be turned over. :-)
I did read through that whole thread, took me a few months, so I'm not expecting you to read through the whole lot in one go. But there is a search function. Keyword slop, you'll find a bunch of posts from tony gray and a few other knowledgeable mini guys. They've driven a lot of minis, both shimmed and unshimmed, so their experience is worth listening to even if they can't provide a technical explanation. The short version is that it's fine to remove some of the axle play with shims, and maybe a little bit in the steering rack, but it's generally counter productive to worry about the rest of it.