Richard Notton wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark J. Blair " <mblair1@home.net>
> To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
> Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 3:16 AM
> Subject: Re: [MV] M548 track question
>
>
>
>>TacticalTruck@aol.com wrote:
>>
>>>63 required on the left and 64 on the right.
>>>
>>Interesting. Can anybody explain why it was designed to need different
>>numbers of track pads on each side?
>>
>>
> I'll take a stab at it off the top of my head, the US and most of the world
> drives on the right so road camber would necessitate some continuous steering
> bias to the left causing excessive wear and overheating of the left track brake.
> Lengthening the right track would counteract that tendency.
>
> In a similar vein the Universal (Bren) Carrier and the bigger Windsor variant
> use track warping by shifting the front bogies sideways for moderate angles of
> steer before a track brake is applied.
Its because of the torsion bar suspension system. The length of the
torsion bars [width of the hull] means that the roadwheels are not
opposite each other - they are offset slightly and this makes one sides
track slightly longer than the other.
I have an extremely technical paper explaining all this somewhere round
here by Ogorkiewizc and if anyone is really interested in a paper full
of big words and baffling explanations then I will dig it out :-)
TTFN
Jim
ICQ: 58721472
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