Heavy duty axles to survive hard landings?

[discomikey]

That looks like an awful lot of fun. 

 

Always happy to help next time and we have since brought more of our own manufacturing and stock in-house so hopefully timescales will be less of an issue. 

 

Thanks again for the enquiry. I still haven't seen Fast X but it's on the list! 

[simonr]

This is one of the jump cylinder tests.  It's at quite low pressure here - we were trying to tune the pressure & exhaust valve timings to jump, then absorb as much of the impact as possible on landing.  IIRC the concrete block was 700kg.

https://youtu.be/IFFuSKjjOpg

This shows how the suspension on the vehicle was going to work.  There's no way the coil-over would extend fast enough when the jump cylinder fired - so we mointed it on a swing arm.  It extends at it's own pace then just tidies up the last bit of energy on landing.

https://youtube.com/shorts/ZKzf2hKQMhE

This was the suspension setup on the test vehicle

If you look below the jump cylinder rod, you can see a clevis with two holes.  We kind of cheated, and put a steel wheel in here which hovered 50mm off the road such that on takeoff or landing, you see the tyre compress, but it didn't put too much force through the end of the axle.

We also had to add bump-stops on top of the coil over swing arm as on landing, there was enough force to bust stuff.  This just softened the impact a bit.

In the end, this was all canned in preference for traditional slug-firing canons. 

Marcus, Mikey & Joe (built all the test rigs & conducted the testing itself) - if you ever see this, you did an amazing job!

[hurbie]

@simonr can't see the video's , there on private settting .

[simonr]

6 minutes ago, hurbie said:

@simonr can't see the video's , there on private settting .

Doh!  It should be fixed now.