Well I promised another update and here it is! The front suspension is now finished, all it needs is a final setup, but I need to reinstall the engine to do that. You can see in the picture below the rocker had to be slightly re profiled due to the adjuster on the damper, but apart from that it all went as planned.
Front Suspension Changes
July 11th, 2010I have not given up, dont worry, I have just been very busy and not been able to spend much time on the Arachnid, but hopefully I am over the worst, and normal service will resume! Another area that came out of the Brands test was that the car was physically quite hard to steer! It quickly became obvious when we looked at it that the original suspension had a scrub radius of over 5 inchs!!!! So we spent a bit of time redesigning the suspension to sort it all out. We put the figures into our software and have come up with a new arrangement that reduces the scrub radius to effectively nothing. It also allows for longer wishbones, which maintains camber in roll a little better and we have tweaked the roll centres etc etc.
This has meant that we have had to do some welding, with the obvious issues with painting etc, and cutting of the ally panels. However, I have a plan for the winter to go over all the car and reduce weight, I just want to prove these parts before drawing them up in CAD and get them machined in ally, such as the new rockers.. Below you can see the new upper pickup points and the axis for the rocker.
Engine Update
June 20th, 2010No pics here, just an update on the engine itself. The engine has been installed on the dyno, and th ECU re calibrated for the change in crank wheel etc. It has now been fired up and run continuously for a reasonable amount of time, admittedly not under real load, but it was stopping before when idling! It will be put under load on Monday just to check, but at least at the moment it is starting and running correctly!
Engine Bay Cooling
June 20th, 2010Carrying on from cockpit cooling, I thought that it might be a good idea to try to get more heat out of the engine bay. The plan being this would mean less would come into the cockpit! To do this I am in the process of adding some louvers to the rear panel. What I intend to do is glue/rivet ally pieces to make the louvers to experiment. Once its all sorted I will then update the mould for panel and make a new one, as with its of ally all over the place it will look a bit ratty!
Cockpit Cooling Continued
June 20th, 2010With a bit more time this weekend I thought I would get back to cockpit cooling. I previously cut some slots in front of the window, which should be a high pressure area, but I needed to make some exits to allow the air to flow through the cockpit. I wanted to make some louvers for the windows, such that the air passing over them would help to draw the air out. I pondered quite a few options for this, but decided I would try to bend the window itself to make the louver shape. The first issue was to make sure that our heat gun would heat up the lexan sufficiently to put a set into it. Which, as you can see it did!
