Tyre alignment

After a week back breaking office exertion, it was time for another well deserved break with my go kart. This week, we finished off setting up the go karts and fired them up. We now know that it's track worthy. The next big step is where to store our karts; in Singapore or Malaysia?

That question aside, here's the details on how you too, can get started setting up your karts. In this post, specifically, how to align your tyres.

These nuts on the stub axle will adjust the caster angle of your front tyres. What positive/ negative caster angle means that the axis of your wheel will be moved forwards or backwards around a central point. This is adjusted when you align the notches on the nut in different positions. A neutral camber is when both notches are lined up.
The importance is that camber affects the straight line stability of yoru vehicle.




Next, to adjust your front tyres so that they are neither aligned toe in or out, you have to adjust the length of the tie rods. Tie rods come in various lengths, from 9 inches to slightly over 11 inches, so purchasing the correct length is important as the amount of leeway you have to adjust the length is limited.



For want of more sophisticated tools, we opted to perform this task in a more primative fashion.
using a marker, we drew a line at the center of the tyre by rotating it while holding a marker on the surface. This was done on both tyres. From these points of reference on both wheels, we took measurements from the front and back of the wheels. Using these measurements, we could determine if the wheels were aligned in a forwards V or backwards V configuration. In other words, "toe", is the angle that the wheels make with the longitudinal axis of the vehicle drawn in the center of the vehicle. Adjusting the tie rods pivoted the wheels inwards or outwards. What we aimed to achieve was a neutral toe. To arrive at this desired outcome, we adjusted the tyres so that the measurements from both wheels at the front and back of the tyres were equal.

Adjusting camber is done in a similar fashion, except that the measurements that you want to match up are the distances from the top and bottom of both tyres.




IT MOVES!!! IT LIVES!!! IT LIVES!!!
Unfortunately at this time after driving our karts up and down the driveway, the tell tale plastic/ rubber acrid smell led us to discover that one of the karts had a jammed clutch and was rubbing against the clutch drum. Back to the workshop for that one and another future post.