Slight Toe Out on Rears

Feb 26, 2012
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Helped my son with his 1st BSA Derby build. We won our pack with a best time of 3.107 on a 42 foot Best Track and we are going to districts in 2 weeks. The car is standard wheel base with raised RF wheel. COM is 1 inch. Stock BSA wheels and Axles and standard wheel base. I used the slots and an axle drilling tool to drill the holes at the top of the slots. The car runs with a slight drift of about 4 inches to the right over 8 feet. There seems to be a slight toe out to both rears (no camber): the wheels migrate to the nail head rolling forward but migrate to the body rolling back. How much is this toe out hurting us? Thanks for your help.
 
Zackracing,

Can you give us some more details on the axles

Are they bent or did you drill the holes canted with straight axles?
 
I don't know exactly how much that will hurt your times, but it will. I would turn the axles and see if you can get the wheels to migrate correctly. If you cant then you would have to make the decision on whether to leave as is or to try and re-drill.

You don't have enough drift, especially for a Scout track. 3-4" minimum in 4 foot and something like 10-11" on an 8 ft. tuning board. I would error on the side of too much drift, not too little for a scout race. A little more drift isn't going to hurt you as bad as a few runs that wiggle.
 
[font="times new roman, times, serif"]Before I found this forum and was using different or stock axles you really cant tell if they are true or not...I fought a car some time ago and ended up as a last resort swapping the wheel and axle side to side and I dont know if it was luck or what but it worked...Good luck...[/font]
 
5KidsRacing said:
I don't know exactly how much that will hurt your times, but it will. I would turn the axles and see if you can get the wheels to migrate correctly. If you cant then you would have to make the decision on whether to leave as is or to try and re-drill.

You don't have enough drift, especially for a Scout track. 3-4" minimum in 4 foot and something like 10-11" on an 8 ft. tuning board. I would error on the side of too much drift, not too little for a scout race. A little more drift isn't going to hurt you as bad as a few runs that wiggle.

Guide advise on all accounts.
 
Chief said:
Before I found this forum and was using different or stock axles you really cant tell if they are true or not...I fought a car some time ago and ended up as a last resort swapping the wheel and axle side to side and I dont know if it was luck or what but it worked...Good luck...

real good point Chief.... You may want to try prepping another set of axles or swapping the current ones around before you redrill. Sometimes you get an axle that just doesn't cooperate.
 
Thanks for the input. I will try adjusting or switching current axles before drilling and see how we can do. I will see if we can increase the drift with the DFW. I can see that we will be looking into a test track before next season. Thanks!
 
A couple of times, I had a real nice body, and found the same problem on the rear wheels (a tiny bit of toe-in OR out). I removed the axles. made a bend slot, and bent the axle ONLY a TINY bit, just enough to rotate the wheel to a parallel position. In my case, the holes had been drilled in a canted position and the axle bend was tiny enough that the cant remained fairly true. It worked for BSA races (grand kids), increasing the time by more than 1/100th.

But this would never work for league races, where everything has to be so perfect, that several 1000ths can put you down several places. Point is, going this direction puts the whole geometry of the wheel/axle set up off just enough to put you out of the running. In my case, I finally put the beautiful, but out of alignment bodies on the RETIRED SHELF.
 
I was thinking along the same lines that a small bend in the axle might be need to get the wheel to migrate correctly. We will make 2 rear axles to use as a fall back but we will try rotating the axles 1st and see if there might already be a slight bend that will work for us. We will also increase the drift on the DFW. I think that is all the adjustments we will make before the district race.
 
Resophonic, I was going with the basics when we started and just tried to drill straight holes and use the straightest axles (we did use a press). I didn't even know about the wheel migration until after the Pack race was over and we were looking the car over to decide what else we could try before the district.