Sometime last year I spent about 15 minutes dumpster-diving and cracked up a through-tube side damper system for my MR-03.
I found a bunch of steel shafts and some brass bushing tubes that fit nicely around them, in a ziplock bag, in the recycle bin. Realized that they were 2mm diameter (1.98mm caliper confirmed!), stuck them into some spare shock ends that I got from Philip, then realized that they were the EXACT length I needed to fit one right in between the mounting holes for the PN tri-shock. I wrapped two layers of electrical tape around two of the bushings to get the right tube length, then superglued the tube assembly to a spare MRCG servo horn. Bolted this to the motor mount with no fitment problems at all.
On the chassis side, I sacrificed a disk damper plate and superglued a 3mm ID piece of plastic tubing to the end, along the centerline of the car.
And what the heck, everything fits!
Although this prototype is not raceable (probably would disengage after a few bumps), it works well on the bench. Zero play, damping feels good.
Hadn't done any homebrew experiments like that to my micro RC's in such a long time, feels great. Better yet, I know how to design the final product to retain this wonderful smoothness AND have some springs on the ends to keep the functionality of the PN tri-shock. In a production version the shock would be mounted similarly to how the Serpent S120 does it:
The fun part of this concept was that I could replace the damper shaft with a 2mm carbon one, for ridiculously low weight and minimal additional friction (at least not with thick grease, and with a Delrin/plastic damper tube). I really wanted to try this option out, personally. I even have 2mm carbon shaft right now, just not the right plastic tube to reduce wear on the shaft.
Anyways, I think this project, originally an attempt to improve upon the tri-shock, is now defunct so I thought I'd post it up as a record of a neat little experiment. That said, I have a new prototype coming in for another possible damping configuration, it's got much more potential than this system and could definitely make it to production.
More of a proof of concept design than a race test prototype... interesting idea. I had thought about doing something similar for the F1 a while back, but never got around to it.
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EMUracing Micro RC Syndicate /DG Designs /GSR /Reflex Racing /Fast By Faqish /MurderTown Racing
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