Fishtailing/shimmying solutions

Questions and Ideas to track building, how are you doing it? need help? new features? share your ideas.
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WesR
Posts: 371
Joined: Fri 21. Dec 2012 17:37

Fishtailing/shimmying solutions

Post by WesR »

On long straights, at full speed, some cars have a tendency to shimmy. I still have some cars which are perfect and some not quite perfect and I am still not sure of all the answers but this can certainly be eliminated to the point where other people would not notice.
Great attention needs to be paid to the track, particularly the height of the wire. This must be at least flush with the surface or even slightly raised. The photo shows part of the Linford 2 straight. This straight was laid with the card system, which I considered an easy way to get wire and surface flush, but I am still finding areas where the wire is low ( or the surface high! Perhaps too much glue under the card!) The problem with card is that it is difficult to sand down. I now prefer the plaster system as this is easy to sand down or build up as necessary.
At the point shown, a lane change wire joins the inside lane. This was found to be slightly high and the inside lane wire slightly low. The steering magnet in the car was attracted to the lane change wire at this point and this was inducing a shimmy. The straight wire was raised and re-glued and an improvement noted. You can perhaps see that the l/c wire does not in fact connect with the straight wire. This also helps to reduce the shimmy.
Every lane change, both the entrance and the exit, are weak points on a straight and I would suggest keeping these to a minimum. There is only this one on the whole of this track and we found it was seldom used during racing. The other five are combined l/cs and racing line changes which do two jobs in one!
Re. using heavier wire/stronger magnets, the problem here is that cars tend to spin more (like slot cars) and seldom understeer off the track and also it is more difficult to drive back onto the track as the magnet will lock on the wire as it crosses it and stop the car.
WesR
Posts: 371
Joined: Fri 21. Dec 2012 17:37

Re: Fishtailing/shimmying solutions

Post by WesR »

Photo also shows Nissan R90 prototype on the long w'base chassis. This will be a good running mate to the Sauber Merc. of similar era.
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