Springers, how, why and are they worth it?

[wfo]

you are right their is and issue with using just the frame rail as a leverage point, it will bend. when i went to phoenix to see WHIPPERS GODZILLA for the first time that was the first thing i noticed and commented on..
if you go to M.P.S thread and see what i did to mine you will see they are mounted right at the upper part of the shock on the inside.. GOLIATH has 4 heavy gauge cross bars throughout with some having heim joints
for those uneven landings that need a little flex...so yes you have to add the weight to handle the stress but then you offset that with more H.P.

[kghills]

OK, i just decided to step in the water and ask a question. From what i am seeing i am assuming just by looking at the pictures that the bearing bolts are where the entire assembly is bolted into the machine. Is there a stiffener plate inside to lock all the towers together and if not where is the vertical load transferred to as the spring action occurs? I know you have said this is the prototype, seems like a lot of load on just those 4 bolts attached to the frame unless your frame has a unique design. I am not a engineer but a mechanic by trade. It seems like a lever effect will occur with each spring action. Just curious i may have missed a picture somewhere.

Lewis

Sorry I missed your question Lewis, and to akcrawler and WFO. Very good questions and design considerations for those thinking about building a springer. Especially if you are thinking of modifying an existing amphib. I will try to explain my findings. My first instinct was with Lewis. Hitting a bump transfers force along the axis of the shock and ultimatly applies a torsional load to the frame. Laying the shock down makes it worse, standing it up makes it better but still does not eliminate it. In looking around I noticed what our friends to the north in Canada were doing with their Argo suspension kits. I also thought about older F150s and Broncos, they had stamped sheet metal spring towers welded the the frame. Sort of a different application but even with 6" lifts I never saw a spring tower give way. I had an Argo Bigfoot and knew the frame. I figured why not give a simple bolt on tower design a try? Keep the shock fairly verticle and if there was any frame deflextion a guy could add a brace to tie the towers together(and add more weight) like the Argo suspension. The thing to remember is the frame rail will want to move in at the top and out at the bottom. Most frames are built like a C on the amphibs. The strenghth of the frame not only comes from it thickness but also the width of the bottom and top width of the C. You can even increase the strenth further by tieing the top and or bottom of the frame to the inner frame that most amphibious machines have that the inner axle bearings mount to. By doing this you esentially create a boxed frame where the tower mounts to thus eliminating the need for a fancy cradle, exo-frame or inner support bars. The Mudd-Ox my towers are bolted to is a commercial machine so it's frame is thicker, has a bigger C channal frame and supports in it already so no additional anything was needed. The guys use a 1/2 drive impact to bolt down the towers to the frame much to even my amazement whithout spinning out the weld nuts. So far the FEA (Finite Element Analysis) engineer has been right in that the frame will take it with the tower just held on by the axle flange. It ran at Ashtabula with no problems. Now just to lighten up the tower more. The FEA engineer says it is way too thick still. Testing will tell I guess.

Here is food for thought. The Coot. Designed by an 18 year old in his garage in 1964. Sheet metal body, no frame, no suspension, huge steel king pin assemblies welded to sheet metal and bolted to the sheet metal body with 6 1/4-28 bolts and supporting up to 31x15.5-15 tires and a bunch of weight.

10,000 units built over the years and the sheet metal tower design has not been an issue. The steering rack will rip loose before the king pin mount even thinks about moving.

Now the question for a tower design on say a lighter recreational machine like a Max or Attex. Will it work? I hope to find out soon. But first, a modified suspension tower for the Coot maybe? Could I post that without looking like a Coot employee or promoting a non existant company by proxy? Confusing

Again, great questions and very important things to consider if you are looking to build a suspension for your machine yourself.

Keith.

[Model Citizen]

[wfo]

remember back in the day of motor cycle racing and the bikes had shocks that went straight up and down and road hard, then came the MX dirt bikes and the had what they called a forward mounted shock
and that was KING, then came the yammer hammer YZ mono shock and it was really the KING, and so on and so on, point is MODEL CITIZEN IS RIGHT ON THE MONEY......THANKS BRIDGET

[kghills]

There is no load or twist on the shock. It just goes up & down. Here's a video that shows torsional movement & there are more to view to explain torsional load. If the shock goes straight up & down, you will get very little travel & a much stiffer ride. Laying the shock down & at an angle makes for more travel & a smoother ride. The shocks on our springers only have 3 1/4" of travel, but we get 6" of travel at the wheel. Laying the shock down does not make it worse. The force is going to the top of the shock no matter what angle it has & the ride will be stiffer if it goes straight up & down.

Bridget

There has to be load on the shock and spring. There is static load and dynamic load. If there was no load you would not need a shock to dampen or a spring to hold the weight, like a hovercraft. Your video explains pretty much what a spring tower is trying to do to the frame. Think of one hand being the end of the frame rail or a cross brace holding the frame rail and the shock tower being the other hand trying to twist the frame. The methods I descibed try to prevent the frame from twisting. While as a generalization it is true laying a shock down can make a ride feel smother this is only true for suspension configurations that are identicle and you are only moving the shock location, sort of a leverage action on the shock. Shock movement compared to overall swing arm travel is a function of how far away the floating end of the shock is mounted away from the fixed end of the swing arm. Closer means less spring travel compared to wheel travel. You can play with ride "feel" in any configuration by plaing with springs an dampening.

The Apache Gear design is not a tower design. It is a nest that the plastic body and frame sits in. The force from the shocks, since they are layed down, is trying to drive through the side plates of the nest the shocks and swing arms are mounted to. The plate needs to be thick enough, gusseted or braced to absorb this load and since the fixed end of the shock is above the top mount for the swing arm it needs to not roll in at the top. If you were to take that same design and mount a short shock more verticle and the floating end of the shock closer to the fixed end of the swing arm you would then be transfering force upward and it would try to drive the shock mount tabs upward off the plate and not through it. Again, ride can also be controled by damping and spring rates to a certain extent no matter how the shock is positioned. Some configurations just make it easier. Most of the time ride quality has nothing to do with why shock are mounted in a certain position on a race vehicle, its more likley to do with traction.

Now in the tower with the shock mounted completely above the upper swing arm we keep the swing arm short and mount the shock rather verticle. This trys to keep the force from trying to twist the frame like in Bridgets example but using the tower as sort of a lever. We try to push the tower upwards, not push the tower inwards. That would be very bad in a tower design.

Fun stuff, Keith.

[kghills]

remember back in the day of motor cycle racing and the bikes had shocks that went straight up and down and road hard, then came the MX dirt bikes and the had what they called a forward mounted shock
and that was KING, then came the yammer hammer YZ mono shock and it was really the KING, and so on and so on, point is MODEL CITIZEN IS RIGHT ON THE MONEY......THANKS BRIDGET

WFO, well... I just did a search on the 2014 Yamaha YZ250F. It uses a short rather verticle standing single spring shock with a long swing arm yielding a lot of mechanical advantage on the shock. I also figured I would take a look at a Can-Am Spyder. Same thing. Short verticle standing spring way up in the swing arm. Am I missing something. I have riden a Spyder. The ride was so soft it sucked.

Keith.

[Model Citizen]

[wfo]

now if you can imagine in that video of the S.S suspension with a straight up and down shock it would still have enough leverage from just the swing arms to
force the top of the frame to twist, that is so obvious. so whats the point in having the shock straight up and down, none , the tower would be in the
way of the rest of the suspension, bulky, heavy and ugly.....so just build one like WHIPPERS and be done with it, if it needs to be stronger then make it out
of heaver gauge steel, add those cross bars and be done with it...it is the best and simplest idea yet.........THATS MY DOLLARS WORTH

[George]

For anyone considering springering their machine someday, ( and we would love to see more) you can see the importance of research. Google all the off road suspensions you can find. It will help you a lot. Mounting a camera to actually see where the stresses are once your creation is ready to test can either send you back to the drawing board OR make you happy for years to come.

Bridget

In this tire comparison video, you can see the suspensions at work from alongside the car. You can see how arms eat up the bumps even at slow speeds.

[Model Citizen]

[kghills]

There are members out there that have commented that I should have been sharing more about my suspension for the good of the hobby. Been wondering since you started this project why aren't you sharing your build with it's own thread? Is this your project or a Mudd Ox/ Max project? Mudd Ox / Max can talk about it. When I did my 1st springer in 2007, I didn't know if it would work, but I still posted a step by step build to help people understand what I was doing & why. That said, I have a question. The pics in Shock & Awe say the front has 3" travel & the rear will have 5". How's that going to work & why did you decide to make it that way.?
R & D isn't easy, but it's always nice to see someone else's build & ideas. Still wanting to see more on Bugeyed 99's Hustler build, too.

Whipper

Nice to have you join the discussion member whipper-ag and thank you for the interest and questions. I would think it nice to be asking the questions rather than answering them for a change.

My members album "Shock & Awe" contains pictures I have collected of suspension ideas along with concepts I have put together for use on production AATVs. I consider the projects my own and not Mudd-Ox/Max projects. Matt of Mudd-Ox was kind enough to allow me to test my individual tower concept on one of his demo Mudd-Ox XLs.

Well, demos don't seem to last long at Mudd-Ox but Matt was in the process of building a XL to use as a test bed for a number of possible upgrades. I guess you could say the timing was right so I put my design into Solid Works and had a friends shop lazer and weld parts for me to assemble into 8 complete suspension tower assemblies. (I'm an idea guy, way to lazy to do production)

What I find interesting is people look at the red Mudd-Ox with the suspension towers and that's all they see. They do not see the 1.6 liter ford 60hp EFI engine or prototype control panel or the fancy ultra bright LED headlights or number of other things the machine is testing.

The way I look at it Matt is testing a design for free using time I don't really have on a machine I don't need to purchase and am not even really sure I would care to own personally.

There are no build thread for a couple of reasons, but the main one is I like to use my gallery to draw pictures from when I start a thread. Sort of like I am doing now. Think of it like sitting down after a vacation and putting all your pictures together to show friends and family rather than sending them every picture as you take it. I find I jump around on projects and some don't get finished right away so just building an album first seems to make better sense for me. (look at the Coot or Coot2 albums as an examples, their going on right now also).

With that said the Max II "box" design is just spin off of the "tower". A Mudd-Ox is a big heavy commercial sort of pricey piece of equipment to me. The tower idea worked but dimensionally and component price is sort of limited to that application. I knew it worked so how small, light and inexpensive can I go? That is what you will see if you look at my latest Shock and Awe album pictures.

Matt was kind enough to loan me a roller Max II so I can fit my concept "Suspension Boxes" to it. The front left box (also works as the right rear) only has 3 inches of travel because initially the shock I was going to use sort of limited it to that amount of travel and I was worried about how much angle the u-joint assemblies would take with the offset.

The left rear box has an 1.5" offset and 5" of total travel and is fitted with a different shock now.

Next you will see a center box that has centered axle and 5" of travel. The idea is to be able to alter the wheel base to run 26x16 Vendettas on wheels offset inwards 3". My experience reforming my Max IV body has me pretty convinced I can devise a method to heat form the body with arches to clear the tires keeping the machine pretty narrow. The suspension boxes should also be able to be fit to all sorts of other machines with very little effort, but this is assuming it all works.

Hope this answers your questions and sorry if I broke some sort of forum "build thread etiquette".

[Noel Woods]

Keith:
Make it rain suspended Max2s all up in here.

[ARGOJIM]

I'd like to see it work and be affordable to the masses,suspension being minimal yet affordable would be nice.

[kghills]

Keith:
Make it rain suspended Max2s all up in here.

Noel as much as I am enjoying the suspension projects I really have no desire to go into production. That will be someone else' deal. And it assumes there is a market and the perceived value is there. Remember, the Max II is just a test bed. The goal is to have a full line of suspension kits available to work on current and past AATVs that can be made with the components from a Max II kit. Then it might rain. I like the idea of rain. It makes mud.

I'd like to see it work and be affordable to the masses,suspension being minimal yet affordable would be nice.

I am pretty convinced at this point that the design will work Jim and I think you are right on the money. At this point I am thinking a suspension kit will cost half of what a set of tracks would cost, maybe even less than that. I am thinking that should make it an affordable upgrade for a new or used machine.

Keith.

[jerseybigfoot]

what is your current hub projection from the body and what is the wheel diameter requirements and offset.