I've had a bit of a break with the car because the development of it has consumed the majority of the events I went to the last few months. Besides that, I have gathered so much data that I have to process that first and decide what developments I can make - there's not much point in driving a prototype without testing new things after all
I may be able to get slightly more out of the car as is, but for the bigger steps in performance, updates to the construction are required. The steering flex was mentioned before in the topic, and it's been appointed as the first thing to change on the car. It's preferable to change as little as possible to the rest of the car to test this, both from a cost perspective as for the purity of the testing result. So far I've been struggling with a really good solution, but today I had a bit of a brainwave
I can do this with the current steering rack, only a little dremeling is needed and a small steel plate!
Go back to page 9, and you may notice the chassis layout there has the link between steering rack and servo on the outside of the chassis. I changed this to allow a lower profile body, but always kept the compatability on the chassis to revert to the edge of the chassis... and this is exactly what I'll be doing! By doing so, the steering rack plate can me reversed (it doesn't need to clear the ball joint of the servo arm anymore) - this means I can lower it by 4-5mm by Dremeling material off the top of the steering arm. The difference is shown below (Left = Old, Right = New):
The lower steering rack plate reduces the distance between that plate and the ball joints of the tie rods - reducing the flex in that particular area by 30-40%!
The other part of the mod will be a small steel plate that connects the servo to the top chassis plate in the center, whereas it was only mounted to the bottom chassis plate before - this will prevent the excessive flex currently present around the servo when under load.
I hope to have the steering mods ready for my next race this weekend, which is on grass. It'll be the first time for me with an FWD buggy on grass, as well as the good test opportunity with high grip levels!