a.moore wrote:
Omaha Vette Graveyard wrote:
They are just started to get into double-butted tubing last year, for example.
I thought the primary benefit was increasing the wall thickness in the weld area to make welding easier? ...
The actual benefit to Caterham and Reynolds was the ability to part the UK Government from a substantial chunk of money, via a research funding bid.
...or perhaps that's just me being cynical!
If you review my past posts, you'll find that I'm actually quite critical of Caterham in some respects. I certainly wouldn't call them 'a brilliant engineering company': they are very conservative in some respects. Some of their suspension 'upgrade' solutions, in particular, are dreadful bodges as a result of them not being willing to deviate too far from their traditional, inherited design.
Never the less, despite (or perhaps because of) their conservatism, their basic spaceframe
is the best optimised 'Seven' type chassis that I know of. I know of stiffer 'Seven' spaceframes, but they're much heavier, and I know of lighter 'Seven' spaceframes, but they're much less stiff. If anyone can come up with an example that offers this specific type of spaceframe with a better stiffness:weight than the Caterham, then I'm genuinely interested: I'm using the Caterham figures to benchmark against my own design, so if there are reliable figures for a better alternative, I want to know about them!
It's a shame OVG has decided to bow out of the thread without answering my specific questions: I'm also genuinely interested to know which other cars have used butted tubing before Caterham; and if there's a way of
reliably welding complex titanium structures without a full argon tent, using backyard levels of technology, then it would be very valuable knowledge.