Hi all,

Eagerly waiting for the weather to buck up before starting to strip my Sierra. In the mean time, been drawing up the chassis (Chris Gibbs design) in 3D CAD and have thought about widening it by about 2" (which i beleive would in turn make it then 4" wider than the original "book" chassis).

How would this effect the steering geometry at the front and could the Escort rack be left without modification? At the back end, how would it effect the driveshafts lengths?

Would be interested to hear anyone elses experiences and has it been done before????

Why not use the Mcsorely plans as these have 4" wider and longer varieties.

Why reinvent the wheel or is it just because I'm a lazy sod

Cheers

Rich

I have looked at the McSoreleys plans but not in great detail. Does it use standard length rear driveshafts and steering rack? Just trying to come up with the easiest "locost" route.

I can't speak for the driveshafts (I don't know what kind of rear end you're using), but I didn't find a single steering rack that didn't need to be shortened (although that turned out to be easier than I had suspected).

My Zetec-engined Locost is a +2+2+2, and the narrowest rack I could find still had to be shortened 2". Originally, it was going to have to be a 4" cut, but we widened the frame at the lower a-arm attachment points by 2". That was necessary, as the rack would have only ended up with about 3" between the mounting saddles - not enough, in my opinion.

The Escort rack suits the +4" chassis a lot better than the book sized one. You need to extend the track rods however.

Hi i have to ask where dose this idea that the std escort rack doesnt suit the book chassis/westfield come from.

Both westfields and book chassis can be setup with less than 10 tho of bumpsteer when a bit of attention is payed to the mounting position and geometry of the car. Again an other one of those myths started by some one who didn't understand what they where doing a bit like offset mushrooms to adjust the castor on the sierra uprights.

Cheers Matt

Steady on there Matt, you'll be telling us next that you don't need 4 pot calipers and vented disks to stop the car either

I, like a lot of people, end up reading loads of stuff on here and maybe some of it should be researched a bit further!!

My thoughts were that if the rack needs modding, just make the nose 2" wider instead of making the rack shorter to 533mm. If people think its just as good without shortening it I wont bother and use as found