Now that most of the chassis is made and modified the next major hurdle is to finish off the rear suspension shock absorber location and mounts. After trying a lot of different combinations I compromised and settled on running the rear shocks on a larger angle than I would have liked. The photos show the first attempt of locating the shocks.
The first attempted location for the rear shock mounting
The steering rack did not come with the chassis when I purchased it so I had to get a steering rack to fit the chassis. The steering rack is available from Van-dieman but the cost was a bit out of my budget so I did some research and found a steering rack that would do the job. The only thing was that it had to be modified to fit the chassis, the main rack shaft needed to be shortened and the main housing needed to be lengthened to fit into the area on the front of the chassis. The photos show the modified rack bolted into the chassis, this was a major component that I needed that had to be modified correctly so the steering geometry was not compromised.
Steering Rack Mounted to Chassis
Now that the suspension up-rights have been machined and are finished, I now needed to link the uprights to the chassis and be able to connect the suspension components to the car. As the front suspension is relatively fixed, thanks to Van-dieman, the front was the first suspension control arms that I made. The photos show the front RHS upright with the upper and lower control arms attached note that the upper camber adjuster is just tacked together to check to see if there is any issues with clearance etc.
Front RHS Upright with Control Arms tacked together
Jig for Control Arms
Thanks to Ron Pommerel at RPS Engineering for calculating the location of the upper and lower positions for the pivots on the front uprights. I then could machine the uprights to take the wheel bearings for the spindles, the mounts for the brake calipers as well as the mounts for the pivots. Then the brake rotors need to be mounted, so an aluminum spindle needed to be machined to mount the brake rotor in the correct location and also to allow for clearance of the calipers inside the road wheels. The photos show the front brake rotor and spindle assembled on the upright.
Front RHS upright with brakes fitted
Front RHS upright with brakes fitted side view
The Suspension development starts on the Rotary Hillclimb Racing Project.
The next major hurdle is the suspension and how to make the geometry from the design that Van-dieman has set out on the front suspension and then apply this to the rear suspension. But to do this I needed to get a few major things like, up-rights, road wheels, brake rotors and brake calipers.
Rear Suspension Pickup Points
The next area to look at is the chassis and fitting the Rotary Engine and gearbox so that the integrity of the original chassis was not compromised in that the strength of my design section of new chassis is as strong or stronger than the original Van-Dieman.
The Chassis & engine after the first cut.
There was a lot of procrastination before I took the grinder to cut the car, knowing that it was a perfectly good chassis and that I could do more harm than good, but it needed to be done if I was to forge ahead with the project.
The photo shows the cut chassis and the donor rotary engine (more…)
Adapting Rotary Engine to the Gearbox on Rotary Hillclimb Racing Project.
So far it has been a simple process I have just shelled out some cash to get a chassis and record information off a known complete chassis, but now the hard work is about to begin, I now have to work-out how to graft the engine and gearbox on to the rear of the Formula Ford chassis.
Rotary Hillclimb Adaptor Plate
This started with deciding on what gearbox to use, if money was no option I would have used a Hewland or Quafe Gearbox but these were well outside the budget for the project, so after some investigating I decided to use a Renault UN5 gearbox. I purchased a rebuilt Renault UN5 box from “Geoff” at Euro-Speed in Geebung on 19-1-08 this box also had a modification to the housing to support the crown-wheel for high horsepower applications, this was suggested to me by Geoff and after suffering from gearbox breakages on the previous car I thought this was a no brainer. (more…)
The new chassis.
The new Project is to build a new Rotary Hillclimb Racing Car (RPV02 Van Dieman RF92).
I purchased a second hand chassis on the 9th Feb 2008 after selling the previous car (RPV01). The photo attached is of the chassis as I placed it down in my garage / home workshop, I purchased the chassis only, with no suspension or steering it is made of chrome-molly steel and the outer body work is fiberglass. The front arms in the photo were on loan so I could get some idea of what they looked like.
Chassis as purchased
I purchased this from Mark Cotrell who had originally purchased the car with the intensions of using parts of it to build himself a sports racing car. (more…)
I hope that you will find this blog informative and interesting. Rotary Hillclimb Racing.com, is an inside look of building and racing a Rotary Hillclimb Racing car from my point of view and hopefully other like-minded people with rotary engine hillclimb racing cars in Queensland.
What have I done to date on this subject? Some 12 years back I wanted to go racing but I did not have the funds. I found that Hillclimb Racing was as excellent form of racing with good value bang for bucks. To participate in this form of motorsport I needed a car and in my opinion the only class I wanted to race in was the outright class, which is Formula Libra (Single Seat Open-Wheeler). As my (Very understanding) wife Suzy and I had just purchased our first home and money was tight so the only way to fund this was for me to build my own car, as to purchase an open-wheeler was out of the question.
Previous Car RPV01 at Mt Cotton Warwick Driving
It took me 2 years to build my first car and I raced it for 10 years with reasonably good results, (more…)
