Well it does depend on the engineer, but essentially yes, each weld will be inspected and the ones I know of (and there are not that many in each state) want to see the welds in some detail. You will also have the battle of producing a structural component in China, a place where (certainly the perception here is) quality control, good welding and good steel are not by any means universal (as you well know)...so with this perception in mind you can assume that these areas need care.

A series of demonstration welds on identical material wouldn't be enough?

....and you know the moment they use the word perception I will scream discrimination. Political correctness can actually work in my favour for a change!

Shame they don't check every Commodore welds isn't it, why is it that a major manufacturer can do any run they want without scrutiny? (for you foreigners, refering to a famous incident in Oz when a newish Holden Commodore broke in 2 just driving down the road).

Jokes aside, while your points hold true I have an advantage within that perception - although it's built in China, it's an Oz designed and made car with Oz QC, Oz trained and supervised staff and Oz hand chosen steel. And your right, some of the steel here is a shocker but I know where to get the good stuff. When I first started I tried to bend some 1" square from the local steel mart, it would get to about 20 degrees and actually snap!

Who's paying for the plane tickets?

That would be a Chevy LS 7 Powered Superlight. The rest is pretty awful from a chassis and suspension design point of view. That thing will snap in half like a pretzel over a speed bump let alone 200mph trip down Mulsanne...And look at those short A arms, jees. Hot exhaust air going in between the wing and the diffuser? The body is fiber glass and is built like a boat. Chopper gun lay up. You cant even open the doors from the inside because they are so heavy. Total weight is about 2400lbs though. Not a simple build either. Better to be a good fabricator to tackle this baby.

Nice transaxle...

Hate it when so much effort is put into area's that don't matter and the real stuff falls short.

Beautiful A-arms but so what - you can't even see the darn things with the body on but your certainly going to notice them from another point of view (thats a referance to the lack of length).

Why on earth did they scratch machine rear uprights and A-arms with single upper and lower attachments requiring a seperate toe control link?

Man, what I could do with those resources.

And I know its not uncommon, but i just hate lower ball joints in tension.

PII, surely you are the modern day Rickenbacker?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Rickenb...ation_gathering

Is this true P11? Are all cars going to have side mirror/headlights in the future? Hmmm, he's spent time in China, I'm starting to see the parallels.

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Anyway, back to MY car ( ) I have done a little more, getting a buck together for the firewall/pedals/front floorpan area and trying some ideas around the rear.

So I'm mucking around at the rear and bucking around at the front!

I may leave the radiator at the back for the 1.6, it's on the axle line, low and saves so much headache being there such as plumbing, no heat being blown on you on hot days in traffic etc. - also helps reduce engine noise.

Same old Bat Station...
www.flickr.com/cheapracer

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Well I'm happy to say I got a wheelbarrow now (a front roller)! Got pedals, steering column, steering rack master cylinder, suspension etc. all mocked up.

Start on the rear tomorrow, I am leaning towards a DiDion tube, your opinions are welcome on that.

Going well, happy that besides the obvious and the featured curved Exo Skeleton side spars, a large majority of my chassis is based around 2D cuts, a few holes and only 4 simple fish mouths. Very little in the way of brackets, tags or other fiddly, time consuming rubbish.

The extra time and effort spent to make a production simple chassis (the work/education started last year on a previous project) is something I didn't expect but looks like it's going to pay off in the long run. My respect for car engineers in companies such as Hyundai has increased tremendously now I know how smart you have to be to make a cheap car and I undestand more about those legendary stories about car companies not wanting to spend an extra 20 cents on this and that .....

Well good to hear you are on the right way !!
What did you decide to do for crash structures?
Found any solutions?
I hqve if i remember well some tech drawing of mandatory crash box to add on roll cages which could interest you maybe.
They can be cheap and easy to make I believe!
Get in touch and I'll send you that.

Neil will be proud of me to know I have blunted the front to allow something forward for a *inset something to make me look smart please* crash structure there.

I have no idea about this subject - a big block of polystyrene foam? 100 aluminium cans (thats not a joke as some of you well know)? Pamela Anderson?

I've got a picture at home of one of those Peugeot 206 open top racers that supported the LMES. They have an enormous chunk of al honeycomb at the front which I can only presume is a crash structure. I'll post it up this evening.

A bunch of empty Coke cans, all glued together to form a crushable structure sounds good.

No joke about the cans, various Uni Students have used it as a low cost impact structure for cars before.

Ok, here's a thought - my Mate owns an aluminium extrusion factory and can make me any size tube I need (and has certain stock) - how about verticle tubes tacked together?

Question is, how many, what diameter/thickness?

Thats besides the various profiles he has that may be more suitable ...
http://www.wingsal.com/english/cpzs.asp

I'm not joking about the cans either.

On another forum there was some debate about how to make a very lightweight car crashworthy and I put a bit of thought into how to add a few inches of crushable structure cheaply to a car.
What I came up with was a bit odd, but I think it'd work - You know conventional plastic bubble packing material, used to wrap packages?


Make a similar type of structure, but from recycled aluminium cans (gotta be recycled, good for the environment, etc) and make them so when you glue them together face-to-face the square cells/bubbles overlap to form an interlocking system. Then glue that lot to the back of another lot, etc.
With the layers closest to the inside of the car, make the air pressure (I'd use nitrogen, it'll help stop fires) inside the bubbles the highest to make them more rigid and the layers closest to the outside of the car have the least pressure.
That'd provide a reasonable crushable structure for naff-all money I think.

Could you get something like that made in China?

And if you left the cans full it'd make a spectacular accident!

Sorry I forgot to post the picture up, I will do it today.

Check out the material they use to make the deformable crash barrier for offset crash. It is an alloy honeycomb, which they then erode chemically to give the right crush characteristic.

Here's some

www.plascore.eu/eu/energy/barriers.php

Anyone thinking a box of drinking straws gets my vote.

Unless the vehicle is really enormous or really light or goes really slow, beer cans and even bubble wrap have gigantic crush cells for our purposes, relatively speaking. We need eensy teensy tiny cells, and zillions and zillions of them, to protect a small and heavy mass (car and occupants) in a short crush stroke. Like a closed-cell polystyrene foam, for example.

Thought experiment: would bubble wrap be a good choice as roll bar padding? Why not?

From there you want a material that is a) cheap and b) already validated for the purpose, for instance Dow Impaxx foam - same stuff as in the doors of the NASCAR CoT, and in OE production applications. The NASCAR door pieces (four to a car, two to a side) are about the biggest pieces I have seen: around five feet long, a foot and a half tall, and about a foot deep, and like any closed-cell absorptive foam can be trimmed to fit.

http://www.sae.org/technical/papers/2008-01-2971

http://www.dynamore.de/download/af06/papers/D-III-1.pdf

http://www.stockcarscience.com/scienceTopi...fety_IMPAXX.php

Here's the Spider Cup car:



I'm not sure what's inside the red plastic section. I'm guessing it's full of foam-like stuff that McGuire is talking about?

Thanks Guys, very informative.

Note that we were talking about coke cans but McGuire immediately mentions beer cans, fruedian slip?

perhaps the most commonly encountered can?
Anyway XPS or styrofoam, which is an extruded polystyrene. Available in different densities so you can make what you need and china is the worlds biggest producer. Also get the CFC free etc one to expand on your 'green' credentials! WRT this you can also highlight the recycling part of the components...all good press. So is this going to be focus based?...good world car and going to be made in Australia.
BTW DeDion....no. Ariel dumped it for a reason perhaps? Also hard to make a car seem advanced with a really old suspension design.

Yeah, a De Dion seems to be 120% of the complications of an IRS for 90% of the benefits. It solves a problem we don't really have any more (camber thrust).

A similar idea, which again introduces some tricky problems, is the Supabeam. This is a twistbeam rear suspension with a floating diff. If this suits your packaging, great, and I know someone who would (probably) love to design it for you. Generally I'd steer clear of a twistbeam if you aren't prepared to accept long development times - just steal one off a donor vehicle. Fatigue is a bitch.

If you want an IRS and don't feel brave I don't think anyone would kill you for fitting Chapman struts or double wishbones. For a track car I doubt there is much in it there. If you are racing I prefer tunability, so double wishbone is the better way to go, but I really like a drag link (ie a long base for the lower A arm on a double wishbone).

Basically with a low cg, on the road, the world is your lobster, most things'll work, even semi trailing arms. I could get more opinionated about live rear axles, you can get too nasty there.

Not at all. Beer cans are very similar if not identical to soda cans, equally suitable for these purposes. However, beer cans have the great advantage of containing beer. Soda cans contain soda, which is bad for you and tastes like fish shit.

If you are thirsty, drink some water. If you would prefer a beverage, drink something civilized. Carbonated soft drink products are like the DeDion axle: Why?

100% agree about low CG, coupled with wide track - as Chapman said, "get it as wide as you can and as low as you can and the rest hardly matters".

A couple of reasons for DeDion thinking was ease of wheelbase change to suit various engines fitments, easily changable roll center height, was going to use the tube as the rear protection bar. I didn't know Ariel even had it in the first place (early model?). I know Caterham use it and a few others did, my Alfetta for example...

If you look at my piccy's close enough you can see I already have Chapman struts (note the lower control arm and hole through the top spar near the rear picture #1128_0006), cheap, easy fitment, adjustable toe.

Just rambling, I wonder if the world would be much different today had Corvairs had DeDions?

I drink Pepsi in China because I don't/won't drink water here except if I can find bottled water bottled by Coke because I trust their process.

Hell yeah deDions, if done properly, are a good thing.
It's just that not enough people know how to make a live-axle type rear end work!

Oh, and thinking about the crash protection examples mentioned above, how would foamed-up alloy from recycled drink cans be?

Yeah I'm on the fence now. One issue that may settle it is that I have the motor quite low and a DeDion may pull the already angled up CV's shafts out too far of the joints.

Whats your live axle secrets? A little neg camber and toe in on turn?

I don't have any great issues with a panhard rod as I'm not restricted to a short one and I was interested in your mumford link sometime ago but you went and changed it without even trying it! Quite funny as just about every link from Google on mumfords points to your picture!

Do a little more reading on the Mallock Trailing Arm Magic #5.
It works extremely well, but only over a relatively small amount of roll. Not the best for road use, so also have a read about the World Cup Mk2 Escorts.

Those guys knew how to make live axles work.

Know the Escort setup very well and setup a couple of rally RX2's and a RX7 similar (extended the top links into the back seat area basically). Stops the oversteer under heavy braking turn in mostly, oops sorry, 'trailbraking' (I got to get savvy with these new words).

I will read up about the MTAM#5, thanks :-)

I will mention today I basically finalised the Chapman mockup, still need to make the toe links though, another advantage with it is the anti dive can be changed in about 2 minutes, undo 1 bolt and change spacers. To be seen if it's useful or not, same setup for the antidive at the front too.

Have any of you guys seen CYMAT aluminum foam?
http://www.cymat.com/3DcastingProducts.html

They have very interesting characteristics when inserted into a crash box. Instead of getting an energy absorption of a + b, depending upon the relative energies of the two elements you can get up up to 7(a+b) as the aluminum foam flows into they folds of the crash box.

After Earnhardt's death I worked with a group to build an energy absorption element for NASCAR. They wimped out and went for the SAFER barrier instead.

I actually remembered my camera and took a few pictures at the Fibreglass Co.

www.flickr.com/cheapracer

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I've actualy been working on it lately, even while you ate your Xmas dinners!

www.flickr.com/cheapracer
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I'm following your thread and it has quite a nice shape, especially in red:) But why don't you put some crash structure on the side panels? It may look even more like a single-seater racer and it will look much safer for side impacts.

Happy New Year!
Forgot you're in China ;)

10/10 for effort, ability, engineering and quality control but I just don't understand with such determination why should it have a frame too similar to the Ariel Atom? Just curious. Someone else who is at it.

[img]http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2201/2038263057_9987250ae1.jpg?v=0[/img]

It's a marketing thing, Ariel have opened it up and I'm looking to fill the market that they can't (affordable). I actually toyed with the idea a bit first and by the time I had finished toying, I had the bulk of the chassis done. This concept is soooo easy to build, cheap and fast, seems a natural (until it rains!).

You would be suprised at how different the frame design is to Ariel, looks the same at a glance thats all.

That build is by a kid 18 years old and knows stuff all about anything, his Dad won't even help him - talk about determination!

By the way, I hacked out a basic shape yesterday and today www.flickr.com/cheapracer

Here's a post from that young Guy.....

I'm an 18 year old former high school student (now in college). I built the car over a period of 15 months, as the many blogs say. I spent a grand total of around $11000. I spent my entire life savings ($4000 or so) and worked for two summers to support it. Last summer, my schedule: wake up at 8, work on the car for an hour, go to work, get back around 5, and work till midnight or 2 am. It wasn't much fun, but I had to get it done before college. Also, I did it almost entirely alone - my dad thought I was crazy and no-one else in my family has any engineering experience. I contracted out the metal bending and the suspension bits were lasercut, but that's about it. I built a welder out of microwave ovens, which would work for 7 seconds before the circuit breaker cut in. I ended up having to put in my own 220v line and buying a real welder, before learning to actually weld.

I may have mentioned my concern for getting the car out of the workshop, well today I had to do it - thru the window!

Sorry that this forum doesn't seem to link to Flickr.

www.flickr.com/cheapracer

Lucky the window was big enough ..... you did plan it that way, ja?

The car was always going to fit sideways thru my door without the roll bars but the problem is that I tacked on the roll bars and then made the buck around them and in a few days I will ship it to another town to do the moulds. I couldn't remove the buck without damaging it! I was really worried until I measured that window which gave me a whole 20mm grace

You can't believe how heavy it is at the moment with all the extra materials and steel for the buck and 10 tins of putty!

Theres some more pictures up tonight too.

Needs a promotional photo, like this one.

Use the Force to control traffic!

So I am curious, what does it take to bring something like this to market?

A truck.

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Ok you were probably serious, it takes determination above everything else, getting through the boring stages.

Cars are very exciting things to design, build and put on the road - but not all 3. Many projects sit in many garages all around the world because most people get excited about 1 or 2 of the 3 parts but lose interest in another stage. I think 3D may have made things worse because it's so easy to sit in a nice warm room and muck around with designs for months on end then actualy having to get your hands dirty in a cold workshop is a bit of a putoff. I have used almost no computer aiding other than a little photo touchup, but I'm lucky, I can visulise and size things in mid air quite well (only took me 30+ years of building cars and bikes daily to get "lucky" I guess ;-) ).

Thats the build, the next step is a business plan and I don't mean a 300 page detailed report but a simple plan for yourself on how you will 1/ make, 2/ sell/market and 3/ deliver them - don't start until you can answer and put all 3 in place.

- how do you go about outsourcing parts?
- how would you manufacture the car?
- what will your development testing methods be?

I guess in a nutshell, I'm interested to learn how you, or anyone in a position to, would go about putting this prototype into production.

1/ I made a commitment to live in China while I develop because it's cheap to do so. You need a lot of money just to live in most Western countries when your developing (not earning), this alone kills most people's plans to do it. The low living cost has given me that very valuable asset, time. You need time to find/outsource parts and other items. In Oz before, for hobby cars or one offs, I spent a lot of spare time in wrecking yards with a tape measure and verniers.

2/ You need a business plan (just the basics will do) to approach someone to do it explaining how you will both benefit or you need a good paying part time job to live and build to order with your other time. You will end up divorced by the way.

3/ I will use a good proportion of standard off the shelf parts in a much lighter car, they didn't break on the heavier car. Other than that a good couple of sessions on some rally roads will show up anything thats going to be a problem. I'm suprised at the amount of custom parts that people use rather than well proven production car items - recent case was a radiator overflow bottle, spun aluminium untried custom job for $200 or Ford/GM plastic bottle for $10 thats proven in a couple of million cars in snowy mountains and hot desert? I'm building a very basic, cheap and reliable fun car and that water bottle is but one example. It will be as pretty as an Atom at 20 meters but not as pretty at 2 meters :-)

Ok probably the Mac will be the gun for this one....

I am considering making up a subframe to take the GM V6 transverse package as an option.

Based on factors such as budget, performance, weight etc. I reckon your GM V6 fits the build very well but I have a problem. We simply don't have the front wheel drive V6 transverse or the Fiero here and until recently, I hadn't even seen one. (Our biggest selling car in Oz is the V6 3800 GM Holden Commodore but it's rear wheel drive and i believe the block is different too).

Locally there is 2 transverse V6's here being junked, a Pontiac Trans Sport and a Chev Lumina APV.

I want to develop basic engine mounts, trans mounts and suspension for the cradle and need to know the following if I can use the above van items for jigging...

Is the basic block the same for all the transverse V6's so as I can make up mounts?

Is the auto trans mounting placement the same as a manual?

Are the CV shaft lengths the same for auto and manual?

Are the CV inners the same for auto and manual as well as the shaft's length?

Are the brakes the same on the van as another GM sedan or is the van fairly common to find parts for at wrecking yards in the States? - maybe I can just base everything around the van's mechanicals, any problems foreseen with that?

For the life of me I have searched the net for the front track for the U platform Van but can't find it, anyone got it to hand please?