SydneyRoverP6B said:
That's great Simon
I can recall many year ago following another P6B along a rough dirt road which was very rough indeed. Speed was only 10 or 15 kph so you I could see the de dion working away as the other Rover negotiated the road. As the wheels moved independently with the body rocking and rolling, the de dion tube remained horizontal, keeping the wheels perpendicular with the road surface.
Ron.
The only time I've seen someone else drive mine was at it's MOT, and over the gentle slope from the road, over the carpark and into the garage I could the the rear wheels doing their 'thing', it just fascinated me, something I could watch over and over! I did think about putting the camera underneath the bumper to get a similar view of the tube working, but couldn't quite get enough moving stuff in shot, I'll have another look later on :wink:
JVY said:
Thanks for posting Simon. I was a little surprised at the amount of vertical movement of the tube. Probably shouldn't be given how far back it is from the front suspension arm. There seemed to be plenty of twisting of the elbow in the tube (again maybe no surprise if one wheel hits a bit of a pothole). However, I was looking to see if there was any obvious sliding of the elbow in the tube. Hard to make this out but, given that the horizontal angle between tube and diff kept changing, I guess there must be?
Did you do any hard cornering during the test? What would be really good is some audio commentary or captions on the video, like "cornering hard left/right now". Only if you really do have some spare time on your hands
When you look at the geometry of the upper and lower arms side on, the tube should stay relatively close to the vertical movement of the wheels, there's a lot of vertical height above the tube for the long suspension to travel into. It's very difficult to get a clear view of the suspension to show the tube expanding and contracting, though my driveshafts are close to horizontal so there is going to be little movement there.
Most of the driving was 10-20mph, with a couple of blasts upto 30mph, around some sharp corners and uneven road surfaces, with a couple of small speed humps and I did drive one side over a roundabout. A fully standard softly sprung P6 should give lots more movement with additional bodyroll!
I did however do this on Thursday,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEebBeBQAXM.
It's on the same camera, but in the end I had to edit it through Windows Movie Maker to trim off the boring beginning and end bits, and in the process lost most of the quality and it changed the screen ratio. That would be a far better lane with a pair of camera's sync'd, one filming the entire suspension, and the other inside filming for an inset second view to demonstrate what's going on outside. I have a couple of camera's, and some new video editing software which I haven't got the hang of yet, and the file format seems a bit unstable when I tried to edit it first time round.