ORIGINAL: djnelsen
ORIGINAL: crunchNmunch
ORIGINAL: djnelsen
As I said before, the stock forks do very little to support the hingepin mounts since they're unsupported at their open ends... and if you look at how the chassis's broke, that's exactly what happened... the hingpin mounts tore out towards the open ends of the forks.
And yes, I agree that this mod may cause breaks to happen elsewhere, but I'd rather have something else break rather than the chassis.
Hmmm, that's odd. But that being the case I'd have tried making some kind of hingpin support to attach at the front of the gearcase.
As my concern now is that you've changed the stress point further back in the chassis and might cause the whole gearcase to sheer off with a lesser impact.
But who knows, and that's the fun of being a true hobbyist and trying to design a fix/better mousetrap.
Good luck.
Well, if the chassis breaks, it breaks... it was definitely going to break again in the same way, so if it breaks somewhere else, same result... a broken chassis is a broken chass: scrap plastic. Regardless of where it breaks.
Here's how I figure it: the more points you can make share the load, the less force each point sees. Having the hingepins supported by the chassis adds two extra points.
Having the forks pass into the spur case doesn't mean that the spur case is taking all the load. The hingepin supports are still taking some load, as are the closed ends of the fork.
I gotta shiny nickel that says something else breaks before the chassis does. And that's just fine with me. Replacing the chassis is a massive rebuild. Replacing shock towers or suspension arms isn't.
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I hear where you're trying to go with your modification, it's just that part of the reason they didn't make those hingepin supports more solid (without the ribbing) is that for whatever reason other things tended to break and they designed them as such as a sort of a "sheer point", kind of like a crumple zone in an automobile. They could have made them more solid, but apparently there's a reason they didn't. It could be something simple like that by them being so solid that every little bump and jump led to a broken suspension arm, or turnbuckle, or steering knuckle, and by building some give into that area is increased the overall deflection/flex of the front end and led to less breakage.
I don't know, mere speculation on my part, but that's generally been my experience with the designs of these cars from back in my day racing for AEand Losi and working on car design.