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Suspension design in the old days...

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Pcar928

Pcar928

Electrical
Mar 18, 2009
28
In the 70's and such, what methods were used to calculate suspension geometry in professional racing and passenger cars?

The closest thing I have found was in Race Tech mag. where Peter Elleray supposedly "demystifies" the process. It is pretty clear up intill the middle of all those matrices, which are tripping me up themselves, where it is filled with typos and inconsistant variables. If anyone has an alternative that could be explained or refer me to that would be great. I would imagine optimization would be very tedious to put it lightly. However I am not concerned as much with the perfect setup, more so a clear and hopefully as simple as possible way of how they did it by hand really.
 
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Look in Costin and Phipps. I started at Rover in 1978 in their Advanced Vehicles section. There were a lot of cluey people around, and yes, a lot of tedious optimisation, involving long bits of string and drawing boards.

Not many matrices tho.

If you are a fan of matrices then look at the source code for wishbone.bas, in the FAQ.

Most of the fundamentals were known by then, as the ideas from control theory for aircraft had encouraged Milliken et al to actually measure what cars did.



Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
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I am not a fan of matrices to be honest, that is just all I have found. I have the book "Racing and Sports car design" by Costin and Phipps, was writen in the early 60's. I haven't opened it in a while. Thanks for the tip. Is the drawing board adn string thing similar to staniforth's "string computer"?
 
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Probably, but I haven't read Staniforth.

Goran Malmberg's experiments are very much in the tradition of UK suspension design.





Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376
 
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Goran has a book, does that have the experiments you are referring to?
 
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