Reddit Reddit reviews Hands-On Race Car Engineer

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Hands-On Race Car Engineer
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1 Reddit comment about Hands-On Race Car Engineer:

u/hockeychick44 ยท 11 pointsr/FSAE

Hi OP, here are some links to answer your questions. First of all, don't open Miliken and Miliken yet; with all due respect, it's probably not something you are able to digest yet and it's not going to have the answers in the way that you need it to tackle this project. What you should do first is ask for clarification; I assume he doesn't want you to design suspension components, but look into ways to effectively adjust toe and camber. Caster is usually a designed element that isn't often adjusted.

If I'm understanding correctly, he'd want you to evaluate your current setup that you have to do alignment and then improve it. Perhaps you don't have a method right now, and he'd want you to create one. These improvements can manifest in changes to the design of the suspension to allow for adjustment or changes to your rig that you use to align the car.

The basic elements of an alignment, or a static setup, are:

  1. Ensuring your corner weights, or the weight of the car on each tire, is balanced front to rear, side to side, and diagonally. Balance doesn't imply equal weights on all 4 tires, but adjusted based on what you'd want your weight balance to be. For example, a team may want 60% of the car's weight in the rear and 40% in the front. This is the first thing that is done.
    Here is a link about corner weights: https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/articles/understanding-corner-weights/

  2. Ensuring your toe settings, front and rear, are appropriate for the track environment (your settings may differ between the acceleration event and skidpad, for example). Toe is usually measured in angles, but if you do some trig and measure distances between the outside of the tires for example, you can set toe. You'd add features to your suspension design to be able to adjust toe, like plates or threaded rods; this is where you'll put your engineer brain to work.

  3. Doing the same thing with camber. Features will need to be added to your suspension design to adjust camber in the same way your toe is adjusted but in a different plane.

  4. Making sure your tire pressures are set correctly. This is technically done before you do corner weights. I just thought of this last, oops.

    You can go relatively low tech (measuring string and using plates) to high tech (digital read outs, etc) based on your budget. You probably have scales to put under each tire, so you'll need to see what kind of scales you have, if you have a way to level them, and what he would like to improve. All these adjustments listed above are done when the car is on scales. Here are a couple of links to online stores where you can see categories of products. Bare minimum, I'd get scales, toe plates, a tape measure, and a camber gauge.
    https://www.racerpartswholesale.com/category/Chassis_Setup_Tools
    http://eastcoastspeed.com/c-701015-pit-tools-equipment-chassis-set-up-tools.html

    When I joined the FSAE team I read "Hands-On Race Car Engineer" to understand this topic in particular. We have a copy that floats in the shop. It's written in plain language and it has a lot of great diagrams for this setup. It also goes into other topics like effective testing. Our copy is well worn with sticky notes and scribbles all through it. I sincerely recommend shelling out the money for it out of your team's budget. http://books.sae.org/r-323/
    https://www.amazon.com/Hands-Race-Engineer-Premiere-Books/dp/0768008980

    I hope others chime in and add on to my comment. I imagine I'm missing things.

    Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/FSAE/comments/5g7rsg/how_does_your_team_do_setup_cambertoealignment/
    Here is another thread discussing this \^