Home THE TRIALS CAR Front End by Grant Campbell
See also THE TRIALS CAR Front End Struts etc
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The Front End on my car is really what makes this car tick. When I built the first of this type of car I'd wanted something that would actually steer. At the time some cars had beam axles, ala Austin 7 and Ford 10. Others built by the likes of Dale Shaw & Barry Hudson used double wishbones. Although we all knew something of what I suppose is the current English design, like Syd Hirst's of NZ, nobody had done anything with them here. Certainly not with a rear engined car. The difference using a rear engine configuration like the VW meant that I was fairly limited in what I could achieve with the rear end travel so the next best thing was to get the front to do all the travelling. Right from the start I wanted to use components from very ordinary cars so spares wouldn't be a problem. I'd fixed the idea of a strut type in my mind, and after some seaching found that the KE30 type Corollas had pretty much all I needed. Cheap & plentiful.

Shows how much lock is available. I took some pains to ensure the Ackerman angle was right. I almost never have any worries about this car understeering, downhill turns win plenty of points in this car. Parallel links locate the pivot and are where they are to provide clearance from upward movement of the wheel, and parallel so that they will pull on some caster at full bump or droop. I reckon that helps to steer a bit in those situations.