Chassis Design

[vmax1974]

I seem to remember a while back someone was talking about this and when they calculated the weight saving on the chassis alone it would have been about 25 percent lighter for the same stiffness but like twinturbo said hanging things off it may be a different matter I was thinking of just using round tube for the bracing parts did a search a while back for tube benders that you could make yourself and came across a contraption that uses the rear hub off a mk3 fiesta and a long length of bar dont know how well it would work but may be worth a try I will post a link when I get home tonight

[TSM Locost]

I agree with you Talon, To make a car go faster, just add lightness. Colin Chapman.

[MarkB]

Bent tubes are bad, short welded tubes are stronger. For an example look at a Ducati 916 frame.

Lighter cars are better than heavy cars as they don't hit things so hard, also don't need 200 pub talks to make it move...

[vmax1974]

sorry i was slow in this been busy here is the link http://www.thefont.info/tubebender/tube_bender.htm

[Tilly819]

I wrote a program that compares tube and box sections for stifness in bending and torsion also restance to tension and compression and a comparison of weight. if you want direct comparisions between various tubes/box's let me now the sizes and i will enter the figures

hope this helps

tilly

[danilo]

Do a wee bit of research and you will find that Lotus and Caterham use 16ga and 18 ga tubings.
Much lighter than the DIY crowd typically uses for their builds.
Apparently the demonstrable benefits of chassis designed by good Engineers

[TQ_uk]

There's a section in this book:



about square/tube comparison - will see if I can remember to have a look tonight & paraphrase it.

Tilly, if you can put up tube 'equivalents' for the usual box section(s) used that'd be great e.g 25mm @ 1.6mm = ?, 25mm @ 2mm = ? etc. Though rest assured we won't hold you accountable