rileyrat

I was a mechanic in the Army for a while and one of the reasons we used the HMMWV (read Humvee) is because the suspention is very universal in the fact it has alot of independent travel. Any time you tie the wheels together you loose some of this. In the full size rock crawlers they tend to use solid axels because of the lack of ability to raise the stock Hummer suspention, otherwise they would love to do something like that. As for R/C crawling you have a leg up on these guys, you can fabricate most of the car yourself. My idea I'm kicking around would be to build a A-arm system similar to that of stadium trucks except that it would be larger and at a greater angle. I would also move the shocks to a horizontal position and use links and a pivot arm to put them to use. Yes my pivot arm would have to be large, and mounted at the lower end of the chassis but I think it would be worth it. The key to true crawling is to maximize your ground clearance and I think this would help. Please feel free to kick my idea around on your own and shoot holes or improve it yourself.

Element

Its not a bad idea at all infact I'm suprised more people havent done it.
I took my evader(st) and to turn it into a mt I had to make shocks moutn my rear shocks are at about a 30 degress and front at abotu 50.No where near what you looking for but I'm waiting to see what it can do on the rocks if it dosent work out I will use it for some good old mud bogging

rileyrat

Yeah, I was thinking that that the shocks would have to sit slightly compressed while the truck is at a stand still so that I will have downward travel as well as upward travel. Maybe something like 3.5 inches of upward travel and .5 inches of downward travel. While doing this I would lose some clearance but I'm thinking more about tecnical rock climbing rather than speed climbing. I'm gonna run into some problems when It comes to steering and such as I'm looking at a set-up similar to a touring car with much greater angles and we all know that puts more stress on the servo but hey nothing I can't beat with an extreamly strong servo.