Wider suspension arms

[Beau S]

the material used for our car parts are nylon-blends, not pure nylon. Nylon does have a natural flex too it. Ex.. RPM B4 arms vs AE B4 arms...

I do not know about current compositions, but I raced for RPM in the early to mid 90's, when RPM was molding the stock and composite arms for AE.. both were different blends of nylon and carbon(if I recall) Carbon reduces the flex of nylon. Which back then, arms were made thin and light, and had to be ridged. Todays arms are thicker, and slightly softer composites or new blends...

So, if you could 3d print with the same composite material that current parts are made of, then you would get the same structural integrity.

If shapeways could do a dual material print, that would add strength

[fredswain]

Tracking says I should get the arms today. Mondays are busy for me so I may not get them tried out until tomorrow evening. They are getting close. Finally.

[mk-Zero]

Tracking says I should get the arms today. Mondays are busy for me so I may not get them tried out until tomorrow evening. They are getting close. Finally.

Sweet, can't wait to hear how they came out! I'f they're good I'll be ordering a pair.

[fredswain]

I tried the arms last night. I'm going to make a few revisions and then they should be good to go. They are 1/16" too long each. That's not much but it's enough and easy to fix. I'm going to redo the shock mounting locations. I modeled them based on the RC10 arm locations but let's be honest, no one uses the inner two locations and they are all a bit far apart. When the arms were widened, the outside mounting hole ended up too close to the tire. I'll revise these to be more usable locations. The last thing I'm going to do is to add the cross brace pattern on the top of the arms that were added in the later worlds rear arms where the braces aren't cut down as far. The material gets thin in this part of the arms and that little bit of material will help. These are all simple to do so I should have them done and reloaded by tonight.

EDIT: I updated them already. They are now loaded and made public.

[mk-Zero]

Sounds good Fred. Got pics?
So remind me, these are made to work with b4 hubs and CVD's?

[fredswain]

No pics on the car but here's the update model. Yes, B4 hubs and cvd's.

In case anyone is curious, I've built in a whopping $1.83 profit into these in Shapeways to cover their fees so I'm not trying to make anything off of them.

[jwscab]

awesome! Nice job!

[Zipster]

quick question on the front arms - from what I've seen in other threads, these should be approx. the same length pin-2-pin as they Klein/Dynotech front arms, at 60.3mm, correct? Any reason they wouldn't be basically interchangeable with a truck front end setup?

"dynotech front arm specs.

center of inner pin to center of outer pin = aprox 60.3mm
over all length = 68.5mm"

[fredswain]

My wide front arms did end up very close in length to the Dynotech front arms but they aren't interchangeable since the inner hinge pin side of the arm is shaped differently. The bulkhead for each is a different size. A Dynotech arm could mount on an RC10 arm mount bulkhead but you'd have tons of shims to take up the open space. The opposite is incompatible.

[Zipster]

Ahh, makes sense - didn't think of that end of things! Thanks!

[mk-Zero]

No pics on the car but here's the update model. Yes, B4 hubs and cvd's.

In case anyone is curious, I've built in a whopping $1.83 profit into these in Shapeways to cover their fees so I'm not trying to make anything off of them.

What's the final car width with b4 wheels and these arms?

[fredswain]

The same as the fronts. What was that, 9.75"? I forget the exact number at the moment but it matches the wide fronts.

[mk-Zero]

Yeah, that's what my front measured, 9.75".
I'll order a set of these next time I'm placing an order with Shapeways. Guess i need to get some b4 hubs and CVD's too

[Beau S]

Fred,

On shock positions.. if this arm made to match b4 rear track, and after all the measurements ive recently taken from the WC, B2/B3, B4, B5.. the 2nd to outer most hole on the WC arm has been conserved to the B2/3/4/5.. the B4 added an outer hole that's 3 or 4mm(I don't have the arm in front of me) away from the conserved WC arm hole. The hub pivot is what changed b/t the b3 & b4 which gave the wider rear stance, instead of lengthening the arm more.

[fredswain]

These arms are designed to use B4 rear hubs with RC10 inner arm mounts to achieve the same width as the modern cars with modern wheels while retaining the look of the stock RC10 arms. The point is not to copy B4 geometry or shock mounting locations so they weren't factored into the design.