rcx132
Philip
- Messages
- 2,708
- Location
- London, UK
This is my buggy design, a lot of work went into it. When I started I knew nothing, I had to learn how to design suspension geometry, how to do analysis, learn how to use CAD properly. I had help from a lot of people, even managed to blag the Lotus race team engineers to take a look at it when the ackerman started giving strange results! Getting all the parts to pack together tightly was months of work, I could have taken shortcuts, just raised the engine to clear everything, but I didn't, I found sumps and axles and a chassis configuration that wrap around each other, and tried many configurations to lower the centre of gravity. Getting the steering balanced was another load of work, the steering rack travel has to match the spherical bearings capability, and match desired turning circles. And it was all designed to be compliant with MSA, Ultra4, and IVA so that it can be road registered.
Having been on a six month waiting list, the chassis was supposed to be started in April but the fabricator had some delays. Yesterday, after another three months wait, he had to cancel my project outright. He was caught up in the TNT hacking, and all his projects that were in transit back to customers were lost, not only does he have to refund his customers or redo the work, but also source the raw parts that customers had provided him for their projects. E.g. if he'd modified a rare transferbox for a customer, he has to redo the work and find another equivilent transferbox. Poor guy. I've known him for years, he's done many jobs for me, I trust he's telling the truth.
I did think about making the chassis myself, but having spoken to people who've done this, it is a lot more difficult than it looks because the metal moves as you put it together and even if it's all been laser cut, the warping and errors compund making subsequent joints not match up. One guy commented that he'd done it, and won't ever do it again, and has his chassis done professionally now.
So does anyone know any chassis builders that I can approach? I only had a few quotes, one was from a company in Poland, it was cheap but they didn't convince me that they could do it to MSA spec, i.e. without the bends going oval. I had a quote from a well known UK company, they said £10k, which is a fair price for the amount of work, but the third fabricator was able to do it for much less and to a high standard, I saw his work it was very good. But he's out the picture now unless I wait another year for him to get back on his feet.. The £10k price is well beyond my budget. I don't want to disclose what my third quote was, but it was much less and included the chassis, engine and drivetrain mounts, suspension, and hubs!
Having been on a six month waiting list, the chassis was supposed to be started in April but the fabricator had some delays. Yesterday, after another three months wait, he had to cancel my project outright. He was caught up in the TNT hacking, and all his projects that were in transit back to customers were lost, not only does he have to refund his customers or redo the work, but also source the raw parts that customers had provided him for their projects. E.g. if he'd modified a rare transferbox for a customer, he has to redo the work and find another equivilent transferbox. Poor guy. I've known him for years, he's done many jobs for me, I trust he's telling the truth.
I did think about making the chassis myself, but having spoken to people who've done this, it is a lot more difficult than it looks because the metal moves as you put it together and even if it's all been laser cut, the warping and errors compund making subsequent joints not match up. One guy commented that he'd done it, and won't ever do it again, and has his chassis done professionally now.
So does anyone know any chassis builders that I can approach? I only had a few quotes, one was from a company in Poland, it was cheap but they didn't convince me that they could do it to MSA spec, i.e. without the bends going oval. I had a quote from a well known UK company, they said £10k, which is a fair price for the amount of work, but the third fabricator was able to do it for much less and to a high standard, I saw his work it was very good. But he's out the picture now unless I wait another year for him to get back on his feet.. The £10k price is well beyond my budget. I don't want to disclose what my third quote was, but it was much less and included the chassis, engine and drivetrain mounts, suspension, and hubs!
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