Camber in solid rear axle cars

[evanwebb]

For what it's worth, Mark Donohue in his book "The Unfair Advantage" talks about how they tried this on their TransAm Camaros and never had any success with it and rated it as a big time-wasting failure. But, probably the easiness of doing this depends on the variations in design of the live axle between manufacturers, and besides I'm sure we're all smarter than Mark Donohue anyway ;-) As another aside, the english Mallock cars used live rear axles for many years in preference to IRS and there was an article about 10 - 15 years ago in Race Car Engineering about all their "magic" tricks to make live rear axles work very well for road racing, you might want to find that...

[Dick Elliott]

In the old days, both Mark and Roger, were famous for their reverse psychology. Nobody in the pits beleaved a word they said. He was fast for only one reason. His own driveing. Mark knew how to play mind games like nobody I ever met. He liked to play a game called "The dozens". Very smart person.

[This message has been edited by Dick Elliott (edited August 01, 2005).]

[Allen Brown]

I just pulled the rear end out of the old GSL-SE. Out of the IT car and to transplant into the GT car.

I thought now that I am changing classes I could add some camber. I had been told previously to keep less than 1 degree or one will have binding issues. I have always thought my car was more stable than some of the other 1st gens on the track going through the corners.

After measuring the tubes about a half dozen times...I had 0.75 on the passenger side and 0.8 on the drivers side. And the toe in was as close to 0 as I could measure. I had never tweaked it duringf the five years it was in the IT car....But I have always thought my car was more stable than some of the other 1st gens on the track when going through the corners.

After 15 years on the street and 5 years of being beat across the curbing the diff is as close as one could hope without going to a floater setup. Oh well....sometime being a bit lucky is just fine...

[lbhgti]

Originally posted by rlearp@Jul 28 2005, 01:16 PM
So, this welding on the tube in the localized top area heats that up, and then on cooling bends the tube up?

The material will contract upon cooling more than it will expand upon heating, thus bending the tube slightly. Read more about it in the book "Chassis Engineering"

Pretty neat trick if you ask me. Of course, you'd have to find one of these pre-heated and cooled units in a junkyard.