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On 18 Nov 2002, at 23:56, John Jaranson wrote: > Just my engineering 3 cents worth. Maybe a bit more. Thanks John, for reworking this. It's good to get our facts straight on this. Yes, I think it's clear that VW intended the top of the tunnel to be the reference line for these measurements and for this line to be horizontal. If the lower arm is already 10 deg upward at the stock setting, can you estimate the angle with different amounts of drop? I wonder how much more this stiffens up the suspension since the compliance is going to go as cos of that angle, for the static case. In the dynamic case I would expect it to be even worse, because the force vector from objects that the tire hits will not be vertical but angled up and to the rear. Once the available suspension motion is at right angles to this force, dynamically, the suspension will be out of travel. At that point the only compliance left is in the tires. Interestingly, if we continue this farther, with the arm angle even more steeply upward, hitting a bump looks like it would cause the suspension to jack the car and actually give negative compliance. Is this realistic, or am I missing something? It's easy to see that hitting larger objects lowers the angle of the force vector on the tire/suspension and gives us our worst case. I'm actually surprised that the stock lower arm angle is ~10 deg upward. I would have expected it to be horizontal or slightly downward, just to allow the system to work thru the horizontal. Maybe they thought that it would be best if the system only went thru horizontal below equilibrium (when the wheel dropped into a pothole,) but I don't see any advantage to that off hand. Do you have any estimates of what the arm angles are at the 2 stock extremes of travel? - Jim Adney jadney@vwtype3.org Madison, WI 53711-3054 USA ------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <type3-off@vwtype3.org> For more help, see http://vwtype3.org/list/