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thx Driven 5 for pointing that out.. I had nearly forgotten about the upper control arm being un triangulated.. I was planing on running a vertical support to reinforce the tubing but I like the idea of the triangulated upper arm better and after some thought I think I can make that work with my set up. as always this is a work in progress and some time I am so focused on one aspect that I tend to neglect another for a moment.. thanks for the input hopefully over the next few months Ill be able to re work the front end..

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DESIGN ICONICALLY - DO EPICALLY

Ok here's version 2 or so .. Im more thinking out loud at this point..

I am sold for the most part on the two piece linkage as you can adjust you travel and motion ratio...

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DESIGN ICONICALLY - DO EPICALLY

all very well but!!!

with all those pivot points that need a clearance to actually pivot the clearances will stack up and there will be slop.

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this story shall the good man teach his son,
and chrispin chrispian shall ne'er go by,
from this day to the end of the world.
but we in it shall be remembered.

On my MG (And the LMP360) I ran VSAL (Instant Centers) of ~2.5X track width in the front and more like 1.25 rear. I did this because Caster on the front will provide camber during cornering. The rear all cornering camber comes from wishbone geometry, the wheels don't turn around the kingpin so it has to have a more aggressive camber curve.
I run about 6-7* caster and that has seemed to be good. The car (MG) exhibits consistent behavior during all phases of cornering. This tells me that the theory is at least sound that different cornering loads and radius result in reasonably consistent performance.

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MG midget bodied Locostish car in progress

Have you gone through your linkage design to find the motion ratio? Do you have a computer simulator for this? Thx.

yes and no .. I initially used wishbone and got kind of close then MV8 refined them considerably... I then used them to creat a scketch in sloid works to star building the suspension pieces in and to make sure every thing fit well.. there were several previous attempts that became to complicated and thus scrapped however this current one seems to show promise in both geometry and packaging.. most of the packaging was done trial and error to fit in solid works

as it stands its at a 1:.97 motion ratio but i think I can get a 1:1 if i rework it a bit..



I plan to use rod ends on the link and a bushing for the upper pivot arm .. besides the bushing do you think Id have more slop than a push push/pull rod type suspension??

the one thing I still need to find out is if the suspension is rising rate or falling rate overall .. initially the rocker arm to shock is set up to be rising rate but with the interaction of the linkage and upper control arm angles In not sure how it will affect the rate .. at the moment I plan to make a mock-up of the suspension arm, link and rocker to test the suspension travel on .. Im thinking of using a scale and known weight at increments along the suspension moment to plot a graph of the effectiveness...any input or thought on this idea are more than welcome.. I haven't gone through my trig class or have the software yet so I cant do this mathematically or digitally.

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DESIGN ICONICALLY - DO EPICALLY

I’m playing with rocker arms and ratios myself right now. What I did was set the bell crank length for 5 in of shock travel with 60 degrees of bellcrank rotation. Then the length of the input end of the bellcrank was set for the same 60 degrees rotation for a wheel input (up and down) of the same 5 inches for my 1:1 overall ratio. The shock angle to the bellcrank was set to be progressive. I believe my input link is progressive as well but I was looking for computer verification.