On Mon, Sep 2, 2013 at 10:41 PM, Sean Korb <[email protected]> wrote: > I would be very careful using a Berkeley. If you are going to add weight > to the car, much of the chassis is a plastic and steel reinforced tub. > More weight will put stresses on it that probably were not imagined by the > engineers. What little brakes it has will be easily overcome by the > increased weight. Unless you are re-engineering the chassis (see below > link), I would keep the speed down below 45MPH and cut the range with > 200lbs of LiPO4 cells spread across the chassis if you can. It keeps in > character of the car and it's still enjoyable. I think a burst to 65MPH in > a Berkeley would be terrifying no matter the power source.
I tend to agree that this needs to be seen as re-engineering the car. It will be astoundingly easy to deliver quadruple the torque to that chassis and drivetrain that had ever been imagined by the designers. You need to pay close attention to how and where those forces are distributed. That said, let's not be timid. 45 mph? I don't think so. These cars were raced, and did rather well. They're not tinker toys. I wouldn't be afraid of 100 mph, as long as I worked up to it and strengthened a bit as necessary. Pay attention to the Berkeley racers about brakes and you should be fine. Now crashing at 100 mph? No thanks. The Berkeley isn't up to it, unless you put a good roll cage in it. Do that and fear nothing. One last thing. I've said it before and here it is again: Do NOT keep the original transmission. Go direct drive or plan on scattering those defenseless little cogs that were designed for the wheezer of an engine it came with. Chris -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20130903/e0289a45/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
