A excel spreadsheet that can be used to figure out how your donor brakes are going to perform on your locost, or to design a custom system.
It uses vehicle weight and front weight split to figure out your vehicle braking needs. If you know your CoG height, g-force generated by your tires, and friction coefficient of your pads great, if not there's help and approximations.
The sheet can tell you about your needed brake bias, the bias provided by your system, pedal effort, whether you need a proportioning valve and where it should be set.
The formulas used are based on the information found in "Brake Handbook" by Fred Puhn. They only work only for disc/disc systems.
It's important that any design be thoroughly tested, see "Brake Handbook" or other related literature for information on how to test your system.
MikesBrakes.xls (Version 1.1 updated 11/2/2004)
Please let me know if you find any errors, or if you have any suggestions or additional requirements.
Some notes on "Using a CAD Program to Analyze Your Suspension".
A word version (and potentially more up to date) of this document: SuspensionDynamics.doc or in SuspensionDynamics.zip. You can
download a free word document viewer from microsoft (last check it was
under Office 97/98 downloads, as a Word97 viewer).
Please let me know if you find errors, have any suggestions or additional tips.
The output of word as HTML isn't all that stable, but you might be able to view the document in your browser here:
SuspensionDynamics.htm
I've also had a close look at bumpsteer from a theoretical perspective: Bump Steer Discussion.
These drawings were made using Turbocad V7. You should be able to view or print them using Turbocad 2d, available for free from Imsisoft.
Update 7/2002: I have also provided the drawings in DXF format, which should allow any drafting package to be used. Imsisoft has changed their file format since TCAD V4.0, so now their free download TCAD version cannot read the TCW format. If you use the TCAD learning version, you'll need to use the "File->open" menu item and change the file types searched to "DXF" load the drawings.
Bob's inboard shock design and some other information available here: Bob's Locost Drawings.
You may need to use mouse button 2 and the "save target as" option to save these files using your browser.
The advantage of using a CAD program is that you can scale the drawings appropriately for your printer.
