I'd strongly agree with that. If you read through his development blog for the car, he highlights the various engineering shortcomings that he came accross and had to fix....like the front uprights that aren't actually strong enough, the front wheel bearings that are unsealed and as a result die after no time at all and the horrendous rocker/damper geometry which puts enough force into the rocker mounds to bend them! There was little he could do about the last one apart from make a modified rocker that reduced the problem somewhat.

This is also what stood out to me, it looks like Ariel could do a lot worse than contact him directly and discuss the improvements he's made.

And if I was an Atom owner I'd be talking to him about retro-fitting his upgrades.

Hell, I'm even thinking of shipping him my Ultima GTR and seeing what he could do with that, I'd love inboard shocks for example..

Ariel undoubtedly speak to him he is not unknown in Ariel circles. The Atom was a test muel for his engine which will ultimatly be fitted in his own DP1 sports car.

If you look at the shortcomings you list they really apply to cars being driven on track on slicks where the forces on wheel bearings are much higher. Also the Brammo cars were not built exactly to UK tollerances / quality. The new US builder, TMI seem to be doing a much better job.

Ben

I'm sure there were some fabrication issues, but generally the design of a lot of the car is quite flawed. I'm an automotive design engineer myself, and everything he highlights as being an issue are fairly fundamental design issues that should really have been rectified. It's fairly common in the kit car/low volume sports car market as many are based on old designs and/or don't have the resources to re-design and retool stuff, but really, many of the issues should have been sorted early on with the Atom considering it was a clean sheet design.

The uprights for instance should never be failing in the way they are. The tyres he was running are only trackday spec which really should have been considered and designed for on this kind of car. The uprights should be able to cope with 1.5x normal loading at least and they come no where close. I believe he measured 4G peak which isn't particularly unusual when you consider riding a bump under full cornering load. This is all by the by though. When designing anything, you have to consider abuse case situations. When designing an extreme sports car, you could reasonably expect it to run with slicks at some point. Designing for this would have had little in the way of cost implications and the fact it even fails at 0.75x normal loading shows that either no calculation/simulation was done or the ones that were done were incorrect. I suspect the former.

His solutions are always fairly expensive, but mainy due to the lack of tooling capability. The Porsche bearings I believe were chosen for their size rather than anything else. Considering wheel bearings are all made by the same suppliers, they won't be any more expensive than those found in a hot hatch.

carsnapper

334 posts

242 months

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Thursday 29th April 2010

Hartley H1 V8, 2.8L, 400hp @10,000 RPM

10,000 RPM V8 with 396 HP for <£50K...brilliant. I'd rather that than spend another £60K for another 100HP 'Factory' version.

ScoobieWRX

4,863 posts

227 months

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Friday 30th April 2010

And to make up that 100 horsepower wouldn't take silly amounts of money if that's what you wanted so you're still quids in.

p1doc

3,124 posts

185 months

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