Don & Tony;
Thanks for your interest. I looked at my build diary and it has been a long time since I updated it. I hadn't realized that it had been that long!
I haven't made as much progress as I would have liked on my car but it hasn't been completely neglected. Late last year, Joline and I went on a South American cruise which ate up quite a bit of time. We boarded ship in Buenos Aires and sailed to the Falkland Islands and continued down to cape Horn, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego, through the Strait of Magellan and the Drake Passage, finally ending up in Valparaiso. We spent a little time there and then flew from Santiago to Easter Island (Rapa Nui) for a week-- a totally cool place. Then back to Santiago and to Iquique, up north in Chile where I worked for a time 15 years ago. It was interesting to visit there-- the city has grown considerably. Then we flew back to Santiago and then home to Tucson. It was a long trip but we thoroughly enjoyed it.
Getting the bad cold/flu or whatever is going around hasn't helped, either plus I've been working on some consulting jobs that take time but at least earn $.
I did get my front wheels-- Bassett racing wheels and the Goodyears are mounted and the wheels are bolted on. I've been struggling with my rear suspension design; it is a copy of a Porsche 996 since those are the uprights that I've used, but I have not been happy with the bump steer of the original Porsche geometry so I've made a few changes that did improve it. Finally I decided that I needed to get this under control once and for all, so I built a balsa wood model of the rear suspension so that I could visualize what was happening as the wheel moved up and down. It helped me understand the 5-link geometry but to get everything analyzed accurately I needed to use a computer. I found that Performance Trends offers a full-featured demo of their Suspension Analyzer package that runs for 10 days. This was the only software that is configured for analyzing a 5-link design. After measuring all the ball joint locations in X,Y, & Z, I could work out where the rod-end bearing attachment brackets needed to be located on the chassis to give me the wheel motion that I need. Cutting off some of the existing brackets and re-mounting them is what I'm doing right now.
My friend John Horsman loaned me a large folder of 200mph aerodynamic data that JWA/Gulf Racing had taken in the full-scale wind tunnel at MIRA (Motor Industry Research Associan in the UK). He has data on the Ford GT40, Porsche 917, and the series of Mirage sports racing cars. There was frontal area, drag, front lift/downforce, and rear lift/downforce. These were also performed at yaw angles of 0,5, and 10 degrees! These figures are not directly applicable to my car but there is enough similarity that I can do a reasonable estimate of the horsepower needed at any speed.
Well guys-- back to work.
Regards, Neil Tucson, AZ
