There are numerous references on here to errors in 'The Book' and the usual advice given is to use the PDFs produced by Jim McSorley.
I'm building a chassis based on the book with IRS based on the Tiger system. Thinking back over my build I don't remember coming across any errors in the book which have been corrected in the McSorley plans, (I could be wrong here and no doubt will be corrected if I am). Yes the McSorley plans are more detailed, easier to use and allow for other variations but in themselves they do not compensate for the major errors in the book.
I totally agree with the advice to use the McSorley PDFs in conjunction with 'The Book' but that advice should be tempered with 'beware of the poor dimensioning of the front upper wishbone / trailing arm brackets etc'.
I think it would be an idea to have a thread listing the errors by page number and linking to previous posts resolving them, or maybe even introducing a new catagory devoted to errors and fixes. This would then provide a difinitive list of things to watch out for.

Mick

Agree that a definitive list somewhere would not be a bad idea.

I'm pretty sure I made a list when doing my chassis and compared the lengths of each chassis member from the book versus McSorley. McSorley won every time!

The Book errors are, I believe, mainly in the Imperial measurements. I'm pretty sure I read on TOL that Chairman Ron himself said he'd done them in metric originally and the errors had come in when the publishers had decided to do Imperial conversions.

Cheers,

James

Hi,
I'd like to pint out that some of the "errors" aren't strictly speaking errors. Throughout the book, if you look closely you will see photo's of different cars with subtely different design features. An example is with tubes W1 and W2. Sometimes these are inboard of the little fillet plates linking them with the turret plates and sometimes they are outboard. Another example is regarding the front assembly (LA,LB,LC,LD) and the debate as to whether the top tube should be set back 3" or 4". I believe that 3" is correct as verified by the McSorley plans but you do need to make some other changes to make sure your chassis brackets are supported well enough. The other main area of uncertainty is the positioning of FU1 and FU2 which I think most people now agree should only be fixed once the front mounts have been tacked in place and the wishbones are assembled. FU1 and 2 should then be placed such that the wishbones pivot along an axis which is parallel to the chassis centreline.

My opinion is that the McSorley plans are much more "sorted" and at least take care of the conversion errors and provide exact angles for the cuts. This alone makes them worth using. I think that the build sequence could be improved over the book in some areas to allow sections to be built "flat" on the building surface before going into "3D mode". Again, this is where an accurate set of CAD plans can give you the confidence you need to build the car in sections and then have everything fit together at the end.

I think that yes the true errors should be listed and corrected but the book should make it clearer from the outset that there is no one "correct" design and that there are infinite variations of the Locost, even within the Ron Champion book. That would certainly have saved me considerable amounts of time trying to work out the apparent paradox of tubes W1 and W2 all those months ago!!

Cheers,
Craig.