Aluminum Tubular Frame ?

Has anyone/builder considered using aluminum as a replacement for the steel frames being used today. Marginally higher cost with just as much torsional resistence or more, would yield a significant weight savings over steel. Aluminum is relatively easy to work with and could be shaped and formed to specific needs.

I'm sure that you will get a good many of pros and cons on this, her'e my .02
Experience tells me that you really don't want to go lighter with a speedster chassis as the front end can easily plow in turns under acceleration, I have had to add additional forward weighin the battery area.
Higher speeds also tend to turn the tables in regards to downward force. At high speed, an abundance of air travels under the chassis which in turn, reduces the grab on the roadway.....but who goes fast!

keep the weight-add power!

Geesh I couldn't have said it any better :)

Like Angela once said..."aerodynamics is for people who can't build engines!"

On some new cars, large sections of the frame are hydraformed from aluminum. It works very well. But you have to be REAL smart to determine what alloy, how to form it and if you are welding it, the "good" aluminum welders are not as common as the steel welders...

I can't think of a reason that it can't be done. Its done on bicycles. Bicycles used to be steel only. Then came aluminum. The first aluminum bicycles were pretty nasty rough riding (the steel has a pleasant give to the material). But design technology advanced to the point that many aluminum bicycles ride with good stiffness and excellent vibration dampening.

Of course, carbon fiber pretty much blows it all away... Now there's the ticket Howard. How about a CF uni-body speedster?

angela

I wonder what Henry would say about doing a Carbon fiber frame? Probably overnight my deposite-BACK.

Aluminum prices are through the roof, China is stock piling all the metal that she can get a hold of for the soon to be ENORMOUS auto industry under way there. The smart money says that we co-operate heavily, get in early, invest in a top tier trading partner. THEN, rather than risk losing all of what they've built up, China will exert pressure to keep a nice tight political lid on the countries within her sphere of influence, we'll do the same, the oil will flow out of Russia because Global Warming has FINALLY freed their northern ports of polar ice, the Middle East won't want to risk upsetting the Giant Panda sitting just above them, Korea will revert back into an episode of MASH, Allah will slip back into the Middle Ages, Christ will revert back to something people use to wonder about during Christmas ("If Christ is part of Christmas, then who's the "X" in Xmas?"

Ahhh, the aluminum chassis.
We researched the bejesus out of that before Jim and I decided to stick with steel for the Hoopty. The huge detractor was handling ability with the larger engine. Under hard acceleration, I would not have been able to steer; I would have had to brake hard and use oversteering to corner well, and in a collision I would have risked metal tearing away at any unintentionally weak welds.
I know cars like my old 928s and the Lotus chassis for the Elise are made with serious concerns for safety, what with the doors and the triple-beam yaddah-yaddahs and the hooptifritzness built into the design, but I couldn't have hidden all that safety business and still made it myself. I'd have been cutting corners to keep the amount of materials to a minimum -- and I'm sure safety would have taken a hike. Steel was a better garage-built option from that standpoint alone.
If it was structurally the same as it's built now but made of aluminum, it would have been safe in a crash up to about 20 mph, whereas I think I'm good (it is what it is; I'll get mangled anyway) up to about 50 now before I get really smushed.
I'd maybe consider doing a Mick Chanegis-style monocoque design -- drop the body on top of it -- if I was gonna go that direction. If I do a 911-powered Spyder, I may try that hydroformed, tube aluminum monococque method, just to see if it works.
I'd be paying someone to do the welding, though.

TC -- Interesting take on how the world will soon be under the paw of the Giant Panda. I think India will use their leverage within Dell Computers to have a nuclear showdown with Pakistan at about that point, ala the movie War Games. By then, I'll be living at Ice Station Zebra in the 1950s Nuclear Attack Position, under a desk or in a cinderblock hallway with my knees bent and my fingers laced over my neck. You'll have to call on the HAM and let me know when they attack each other.

OBTW -- I had two cups of coffee at a Starbucks yesterday. Triple mocha white chocolate somethin'-somethin' in a giant bucket-sized cup. The coffee and the customer service were good, but I still spent fifteen bucks. WTF? Then I went for a spin in the Sloppy Jalopy.

WOO-HOO!

"You'll have to call on the HAM . . . "

Whoa . . . I'd forgotten all about those days of Morse Code. I remember how proud we all were when I passed the test and got my operator's license.

Figured that it would all stand me in good stead when I enlisted.

Then some s#it happened and . . . well . . . I still remember most of the code and still have the huge radio at my Dad's place. It always smelled like warm dust and burning coffee pot handles . . .

-

Howard, sorry about that little departure from the thread. There was an experiment in solar energy done by some students at the University of Kentucky where they used a hydro-formed aluminum chassis (pieces apparently made in Ohio) for their car. The company was called Hydro Aluminum North America:
http://www.hydro.com/northamerica/en/
The project car's chassis (for the Formula Sun Grand Prix in 2004) has a page here:
http://www.engr.uky.edu/solarcar/drupal/?q=image/tid/17&from=0
... with a number of photos which show how they jigged it up.

Hello CQ CQ CQ .........
TC,
Recall Tech Class license?
A one year only FCC designation on 50-54 mz.
We would mic key some heavy push that would make the kitchen light dim for second.
My first antenna system was a metal patio table that had the umbrella hole in the center, hoisted the table up on the roof and stuffed the antenna thru the holeand tied the wash line to it so it could be rotated from my bedroom window to "get out" better.....what high tech stuff!

About aluminum chassis: Even beyond the load / stress design considerations, ff you read further about modern Vette or Jaguar or Aston, etc aluminum chassis, it appears that many major pieces are large (very large) castings, connected by riveted and bonded forgings. Then the whole thing is heat cured. That's a bit beyond my garage capability.

There is a fella who lives around El Cajon, CA who some years ago, built a complete monocque carbon fiber '32 hiboy roadster - no frame or subframe. All suspension and engine mounts bonded to the body. Then for good measure, he put an original design SOHC small black Chevy (Chevy didn't make OHC heads back then) engine transversely under the deck lid, and built his own final drive.
That's the guy I want to build my next speedster.

"-

David,
Tom McBurnie at Thunder Ranch built a monocoque chassis 32 Ford. It belongs to (super nice guy) Kenny Graves. It is red with flames. The entire body/chassis weighed 200 pounds. It has either a Northstar or an Aurora V8 (can't remember which) in the rear. The front is trunk. Even with the V8, the car tips the scales at 1850 pounds.

Tom built a couple of these. I think he told me Linda Vaughn had one (hers is white if memory serves).

These were really expensive to build. Its not just the materials, its the design, engineering and testing. Tom did test this chassis to ridiculous failure. Tom stopped making them due to costs involved. Our loss. That was the thinking man's hot-rod.

There is no reason that someone else could not design/engineer/build a monocoque speedster out of CF or other light composite. Speedsters have a solid market. Speedsters have also demonstrated that some well-heeled buyers will pay more for extraordinary machines.

So Howard. How about your 3.2 in a 200 pound chassis? Hmmm....

angela

Tom has a CF speedster at his shop in SD. It is graphite with purple ghost flames. it has been sitting on his car shelf in his yard since I was there in 2004.

Oh REALLY? That rascal Tom's been holding on us! Steve wants to build a 904 next. However.... Scott Sloan took him for a ride in his speedster and Steve LOVED it. Much more comfortable than the spyder. He fit in it perfectly... Hmm....

Of course, Scott's speedster is pretty easy to fall in love with.

angela

I could see cuttin the weight of the car in the rear.

Now that could be a good thing . But no way would I lighten the the front But this does give me some Ideas about the trailing arms and a reworked K frame HUM?

TC:

Never had an aluminum chassis, but long, long ago I had an HT-44 with a bodacious linear (an ex-ship-board Navy transmitter) running three (yes, THREE) 4-1000's in the final. Key-down would light a 4-foot flourescent hanging in a tree over 100 yards from the antenna (a 6-element yagi cut for 14.305 and rotated with a surplus prop-pitch motor). Used to run state-side phone patches for Williams Field in the Antarctic (KC4USB), several of the airbases in SEA and a couple of carriers out in the Tonkin Gulf via Ham frequencies and Navy Mars, all with that big Yagi and a huge, phase-steered Rhombic in my back yard. Was also one of the three state-side contacts for the USS Boxer as it closed in on Grenada during the invasion, keeping them in touch with a Ham operator sitting in his truck in the compound at the US Embassy there (power had been cut off to the compound).

Pretty much stayed on the SSB part of the bands (mostly 20, 21 (MARS) and 10) after I once tried to copy K1WKW in RI, who cruised at over 75 wpm in CW in his head (effortlessly) - decided I wasn't ever going to be that good.

.-.-. (that's what you were looking for as a sign-off)

-.- .---- ..-. .-. ...-
.... .-. .---- -.-. ... -.

Morse Code is such a primitive means of expression these days...

I'm not sure what .-.-.- stands for but the others translate to

K1FRV and HF1KSN

are those call signs or mumbo jumbo???

I think what they meant to say was; .#.:-.&::_-:-*-_.//.:!!

Close, Larry....maybe we're both a little rusty with our 'code... ;>)

._._. is a universal CW (Morse code) sign-off or overall "end of transmission" - more like a strung-together "ar", with the "dah" exagerated on the "A". Don't know where it came from, but it dates back to the early telegraph days of the mid-1800's.

Yes, I was once K1FRV in the 'states and HR1GSN/HR3, meaning that I was also a Honduran Ham operator, operating portable as an HR3 and living in la Esperanza, Honduras (Northwest corner, near Marsala and Copan) while working with los Amigos de las Americas, a volunteer medical organization, still in existence, out of Houston, TX.

Here in the 'States, from 1965 - 1975 I ran nightly phone patches for military personell all over the World to their loved ones back home, mostly in the Northeast, but would make phone calls pretty much anywhere if the need was there (usually we could find other Hams within a short toll call anywhere in the 'States.) The soldiers would find their military "Ham Shack" on base and line up to make a call. They would tell me (or any one of a lot of other Hams) who to call (usually within 200 miles of me), and I would make a collect call to that person and then "patch" them all together over the radio waves, thereby making a "cheap" international call for them. Government and the phone companies usually looked the other way, as we were technically "beating" long distance tariffs, but doing it for our Military folks (and many of my patches were made for people on the other end who were outside of telephone land-line capabilities - read on....)

During the Vietnam era, I would run 10 - 20 each night, 7 nights a week when the bands were open. Where we could "talk" to was dependent on the Ionospheric conditions, same as today, so sometimes Southeast Asia would come in fine in the evening, and other times not. Jumping to Navy MARS (Military Affiliate Radio System) frequencies meant I could run considerably more power and could often get through even with marginal conditions. Several of us in New England were very good at running patches and were awarded by several branches of the Military for the work we did during that era.

We were particularly popular with the Navy folks from Newport and Quonsett Point, RI, as they supported the scientific expeditions to the Antarctic and were based in New England. I was a fixture with McMurdo Sound, Byrd Base and Williams Field, running nightly patches several nights a week (they would show up about 2 hours before Vietnam, when the band opened to their area). They were the ones who arranged for a surplus shipboard transmitter, which became my RF amplifier (and a hell of a potent one it was, too!)

I haven't been "on the bands" in years, so I don't know if patches are still being run or not - with today's cell phone technology and the Military's ability to seed inexpensive cell repeaters all over the place (they dropped them from C130's during Desert Storm) and up-link them to satellites, I suppose today's soldiers simply call home direct, and the Internet and email seems to be everywhere, so Ham Radio Phone Patches are a forgotten luxury. I bet they're still popular with the Peace Corp. types, as they tend to go beyond Cell range.

Anyway, part of a long lost era, but there are a lot of "Computer Nerds" out there who started out in Ham Radio...

Life without HAM/MARS would have stunk at sea in the 80s and early 90s, Gordon. That was the best eighty dollar phone call I ever made -- talking to my brother for two minutes from the USS Midway (CV-41) in the Indian Ocean on my 21st birthday!
"Hey! How's life treating you, over?"
"Not too shabby, over."
How's Dad doing, over ... dit dit dat dat dit dit tadatata dit dat dit dit ..."
It was a whole lot better than letter mail, even if you had to stay up until 2 a.m. to have an availabiltiy!

You San Diego guys and gals say hello to that old crate for me, will'ya? It's got a big, fat 41 painted on it, and the last time I checked up on it, it was tied up somewhere in the vacinity of Harbor Drive and Broadway.

.-.-.- is the end transmission or full stop code isn't it?

Hey, speaking of that "transmission," I betchaone would work out GREAT in an aluminum tube frame, and how about coming to a "full stop." A good set of discs would take care of that problem in no time.

See how artfully I swept the thread back on course . . .

Very artfully done, TC. Gordon tells me that you're an artist.

The man is definitely as cool as a moose.........

Cory, I toured your old carrier last summer. It's tied up in San Diego next to the Star of India, (last iron clad sailing vessel) and the Russian submarine. It's a magnificent ship and really worth the few bucks to take the self guided tour.

Here is the link to that ship. At the top of their web page is a link to "Crew & History" follow that link to the period that you served and you'll find a "crew" message board.

http://www.midway.org/site/pp.asp?c=coIMKTMCF&b=81432

Dang, Larry! Almost enough material on their website to make me want to go to sea on her again!
That ship has to have been more modified than just about any other numbered hull in U.S. Navy history. It started out as a battleship, the gub'ment changed its plans mid-stream and made a straight-decker out of the BB hull, angled the deck later and then made major hull changes below the waterline twice to try to keep it balanced.
I think the thing that kept it going, honestly, was morale. If the crew didn't enjoy the ship and the western Pacific she sailed in, that tub would have been doomed long ago.
I've sure got some sea stories from the good old days involving that thing. Funny, sad, exciting ... It was a good time, for the most part. Lots of work, though. Always something to do on a carrier.