Scott, that's a VERY interesting question! Thinking through how this
works, I'm reasoning that it may actually make it less likely to break off
the stub axle. I hope I'm right since I'm running a set of these and I
already rolled one car at Road America... (where I'm going in a couple of
weeks) Please correct me if I'm wrong - here goes my analysis of why this
works...
The inner wheel bearing inner race butts up against the upright that the
stub axle bolts through.
The new part butts up against the inner wheel bearing inner race as well as
up against the outer wheel bearing inner race.
What this should do is take some of the forces normally applied to the stub
axle and transfer them to the upright through the very hard inner bearing
inner race.
This will increase the tension forces on the stub axle but decrease the
bending moment that the axle sees. I strongly suspect that the bending
forces are much more likely to break the stub axle than tension forces are.
What I have found is that if I run the bearings with a bit of preload, all
of the deflection disappears. If I put the couple of thousanths of free
play that I'm more comfortable with there's some deflection but it's better
than it was.
- Tony Drews
At 09:39 AM 9/5/2003, Barr, Scott wrote:
>Any chance stiffening the stub axle in this way moves the forces around in a
>way which might cause them to start breaking off?
>
>Scott
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